


oh the glory of it all

by hitlikehammers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Building a Life, Domestic Fluff, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Proud Uncles and Godfathers of Basically Everyone's Kids, Retirement, Self-Discovery, Slice of Life, Slow(ish) Burn, So damn soft, Starting Over, Supersoliders in Love, The Softest Happy Ending-Not-Ending; Just as These Two Idiots Deserve, so much love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2020-10-10 04:26:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20521916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: They end up stumbling almost unexpectedly into the white-picket-fence, apple-pie life they used to dream of.Except it’s not like that at all.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something that was _Endagame_-compliant, because a) it felt like a good way to round out my persistent railing against that ending, and b) I had an idea that was disgustingly Steve/Bucky and that could maybe, _possibly work_. This is that idea.
> 
> This will be updated 1-2 times weekly. At least once, but I try to allow for real life being...real life.
> 
> My unending love, as always, to [weepingnaiad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for reading, cheering, encouraging, and pushing me to stick with this one, even when I despaired of it.
> 
> Title credit to The National, specifically [this song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FQtSn_vak0)

He meets Bucky’s eyes as he drops out of the quantum realm and onto the platform; only Bucky’s eyes, as everyone else seems occupied over by the lake, but it’s really only Bucky’s eyes he cares about seeing anyway. But Bucky looks at Steve like he’s impossible, like he cannot be real and Steve isn’t entirely sure what to do with that, unsteady on his feet after the jump; he loses his balance and stumbles, falling to his knees on the metal. 

“Easy,” Bucky’s at his side, reaching for him before he pitches forward and crashes any further, hands on Steve’s chest to steady him, and it’s the most necessary, grounding thing Steve didn’t realize he needed until that very moment: he’s back.

It worked, it’s done, and he’s _back_. 

“Steve?”

Steve’s nearly huffing out a laugh of wonder, but it catches halfway because Bucky’s still looking at him like he’s not sure Steve’s there, like he wasn’t expecting Steve to _be_ there, exactly where they’d planned for him _to_ be, and Steve spares a second to think about what might have gone wrong after he’d made the jump, what could have put that look of surprise and disbelief and something unnamable that Steve wants to chase and find and hold in Bucky’s eyes. Except it’s not a pleasant thing, it’s a hateful thing because it looks like it fucking _hurts_, and Steve Rogers has oriented so much of his life around trying to make up for all the hurting Bucky Barnes has had to endure because Steve wasn’t strong enough, or fast enough, or smart enough, or—

“What,” Steve finds it in him to ask, to quirk his lips around a question: “Did I grow a moustache in the 70s and not notice?”

Bucky’s still wide-eyed when he answers, straight and nearly without emotion, save for the faintness of his tone:

“There were some terrible moustaches in the 70s.”

Steve laughs, a little flat. “There are some terrible moustaches _always_.”

Bucky’s eyes rove over him swiftly, but surely, like he’s double-checking Steve’s existence before he asks:

“Were you there long enough to grow one?”

“God no,” Steve frowns, pulling back a little and only realizing fully, when he does, that Bucky’s hands are still braced on him, and that’s what stops Steve from moving any further, because something in him doesn’t want that touch to go away. 

“You think I wanted to stick around with those goddamn Stones any longer than need be?” Steve asks, incredulous, not leaning back into Bucky’s touch but bowing his head closer to bite out the truth with fervor:

“They unleashed _hell_, Buck,” Steve says from the heart of him; “I wanted them _gone_, and I’d really like them to stay that way.”

It’s then that Steve notices how heavy Bucky’s breathing is: probably undetectable for anyone else but Steve hears it; feels it.

“What is it?” Steve asks, reaching out to wrap his hand around the back of Bucky’s neck and then he feels it, because where Bucky’s braced against Steve’s chest, Steve’s heart’s still pounding; distracting. When Steve touches Bucky’s frame in kind, though, it’s obvious. 

“Buck, you’re shaking, what—”

“_Steve_?”

Because Steve can’t get an answer from Bucky, who doesn’t _stop_ shaking once Steve turns toward Sam’s voice—Sam’s voice that’s incredulous and Sam’s gaze which is just as wondering, though more confused and less…_heartbreaking_ than Bucky’s, and just what the _fuck_ is going on?

“Sam,” Steve smiles tightly, on shaky footing without knowing why in the hell his simple presence, _exactly where he was meant to be_, seems to be such an unexpected find.

“You’re here.”

Steve nods slowly.

“Yeah?”

“You’re _young_.”

He’s not expecting the comment, or the shock in it, and the laugh he huffs out is more of a reflex than anything else.

His hand is still on the back of Bucky’s neck, and maybe no one can see it, but Bucky’s still shaking.

“Not really,” Steve answers ruefully, hoping to find the joke, but Sam just shakes his head.

“No, I mean,” he turns behind him, and it’s only then that Steve notices something big and familiarly-sized in Sam’s grasp. He casts his gaze around to Bucky, who isn’t looking, and then to Bruce, who’s coming up behind with a deep-set frown on his own face. 

“You saw,” Sam demands of him, almost hysterical; “you _saw_—”

“What am I missing?” Steve finally says, when Bruce starts looking at him like he can’t make sense of him, either.

“Old you, he was,” Sam wheels around again, surveying the shore of the lake before his face falls and he asks Bruce, a little lost: “Where’d he go?”

“He just,” Bruce answers, voice far away as he shrugs helplessly: “vanished.” Bruce finally makes it up the path and sets eyes on the platform fully, now: eyes that widen just like everyone else’s, apparently.

“Steve?”

“Bruce,” Steve nods, and tries to navigate foreign territory. “Went off without a hitch.”

“Well,” Bruce says, with no small amount of criticism: “apparently there’s _some_ hitch involved. First, you’re late, and second,” he gestures behind him toward the lake. “What did you change?”

“Nothing,” Steve says, and it’s true. “Spent more time getting a few of them back than I’d have liked but, I thought I followed the instructions to the letter.”

“He’s telling the truth.” Bucky’s voice is low and rough and it startles Steve, who lets go of him abruptly and misses the contact; Bucky doesn’t let go of him, though, as if he physically cannot stand what it might mean to even try, and for Steve, that helps. 

“I know what he sounds like when he lies,” Bucky says, just straight-out states it as fact, and Steve knows that it is less because Bucky believes that he’s not lying, and more because Bucky _would_ know it, would know it better than Steve himself. He always had.

“But he was,” Bruce starts, and then regroups with a note of entreaty in what follows: “Cap, you would have had to have—”

“Bruce,” Steve cuts him off, because there’s something unsettling about what’s being said around him, about Bucky’s touch still trembling that little bit against him, about Sam’s eyes and the bag in his hand and what _had_ to have been changed and someone old and—

Shaking. The worst part is that Bucky’s still shaking. 

“I put them back and came home,” Steve says carefully, but firm. “Interacted less this time than we did the first time, even. Only person I talked to was the…” he thinks a moment, because it feels odd to say it aloud and he wants to make sure he does it right: “The Ancient One?”

“Right,” Bruce draws the word out, watching Steve like he thinks he can read the lie off of him if it’s there; he wouldn’t be able to, of course. Steve’s a damn good liar when he wants to be, and like Bucky’d said: only one living soul knows how to catch it. 

Steve sighs, and tries to piece together a response that they all seem to be waiting for. He doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be, but he can try.

“I have no idea what,” he takes a hand and throws it outward toward the water dismissively; “what _that_ was,” then he looks down at the weight leaning against Sam’s leg, and assumes whatever ‘that’ was brought a very tellingly-shaped gift. “Though I’m glad for that,” he nods indicatively, because it’s true. None of the rest of this makes sense but an out, a way to step back and maybe do what Tony suggested, find a _life_ outside the fight? That makes sense. And Sam makes sense as the one to pass it on to.

“No one better suited to the job.”

“But the shield, you’re,” Sam starts, gesturing at him and sizing him up as he _is_ because apparently the old version of...him? Was it even him, how could they know? And Steve didn’t _do_ anything, he’d left all the versions of himself in the past where they belonged, and goddamnit, if things didn’t quite make sense before, then what the _hell_ was he supposed to do with all of _this_?

He doesn’t realize it until it’s done, but his hand reaches for the one Bucky’s still got splayed on Steve’s chest, and Steve didn’t realize how much of his weight was still depending on Bucky’s strength to hold him up; Steve’s grabbing for the touch, though, like he might need it just as much, or more.

He doesn’t know what to do with this, so he leaps at what he _can_ understand; what he _does_ know.

“Don’t let it become you,” he looks at Sam, tone solemn. “You wield it, and you live up to what it means, but remember that above anything else, you are Sam Wilson.”

Sam swallows hard, but nods. And Steve nods in kind, tries to smile and knows he at least manages a grimace and maybe that’s okay, for now. 

“I’ll be here for you every step of the way, as your friend,” Steve tells him firmly; “but not as your brother in arms.” Sam’s eyes get wide, and the trembling in Bucky stills, though it might be less from calm and more from shock, but Steve isn’t surprised at himself, more just surprised that the words finally come out and feel right, not selfish—or else, not any more selfish than he’s okay with, because he can recognize a line now; thinks he’s finally got a shot at finding a happy medium if he tries. 

“The shield’s yours now, not mine,” Steve says simply. “Not anymore.”

It gets quiet, eerily quiet, and Steve is suddenly so fucking tired he can barely think. Bucky’s hands move on his chest, readjust, because Steve seems to be leaning on him entirely, now, keeping all of none of his weight up on his own. He sighs, but it’s more of a huff because he can’t seem to even lift his lungs that much, the exhaustion hits him so hard, so the question just kind of slips out, sounds like much less of a plea than it is in his bones:

“Can we go inside?”

________________

Steve finds himself hours later, staring out the window and thinking of absolutely nothing in particular except finding the evidence of Bucky nearby in the subtle din of noise in the kitchen: the low rumble of his voice, the distinct footfalls that are deliberate because if they weren’t, even Steve wouldn’t hear them. Sam’s making dinner, and Bucky’s helping, and Bruce is still trying to figure out what the hell happened with this “old Steve” they apparently encountered before Steve himself came back, but Steve can’t bring himself to square with whatever that was, because the fact that he’s here, that _they’re_ here, that he’s got—

Bucky moves. Steve feels himself sit up a little straighter, following the sound; he turns a little as it grows closer, but lingers in the doorway. Steve wishes he could just let the feeling of those eyes—those present eyes, those living eyes, those eyes _here_—wash over him for a lifetime or two, but there’s still something frantic in him, something that can’t sit still and just accept all the loss alongside all the _found_.

“What is it?” he says softly, but Bucky just shakes his head.

“Just,” he shrugs; “just watching.”

Steve nods, and turns back to the window. Watching Bucky in the reflection seems easier, somehow, to believe. To ease into slowly, a truth his heart’s still too fragile to dive into headfirst. 

“Did you go back to her?”

Steve closes his eyes, and listens to Bucky’s breathing behind him; a little shallow, a little hesitant. So this was why he’d looked at Steve that way, when he fell onto the platform. He’d, he’d meant he was going to _miss_ Steve not in case something went wrong; not enough to be soothed by Steve’s assurance that it would be alright: no.

No, he thought Steve was going to choose to _stay_.

Well, shit.

“Didn’t even see her,” Steve says, shifting so that Bucky’s in his peripherals. Somehow he can’t bring himself to look at him head on when he speaks; his heart’s in his throat already at the implications of him thinking, thinking Steve would—

“Avoided her office entirely this time.”

Bucky’s quiet, but he leans back against the wall, weight shifting, breath exhaling long and slow before stopping, like Bucky can’t bring himself to breathe in again yet, like he has to decide something, to hold possibilities in tension and come to a conclusion before he’s allowed to move on.

The hesitation, and the lack of sound, the lack of ability to track Bucky’s very existence and the fact that Steve’s still not sure he can trust his eyes to do it: it’s wreaking havoc beneath his ribs.

“But,” Bucky finally says, voice too low to read anything from the tone. “Didn’t you want to stay?”

Steve processes every word, in the absence of the ability to draw anything from the way that they’re said. He finds himself lingering on the one word: _want_.

Steve’s been so detached from wanting for so long, or maybe that’s all he’s been made of, secretly: want. He swallows hard.

“She was happy,” Steve says simply. “Had a family, a doting husband. I would have been a memory, and hell,” he huffs a breath; “maybe not even all that good of a one, to bring up to a woman who’d been living a life, and a damned beautiful one at that,” and it had been, because Steve knew about it. Maybe it had been forty years later that he’d learned, but he _knew_.

“And she, then,” Steve shakes his head, a little rueful, and Bucky’s still holding his breath: “she would have been the same for me.” 

Bucky exhales, and Steve’s heart settles out of his throat, if only just.

“I had my time with Peggy Carter,” Steve finds himself saying, without even intending any of it to come out. “I heard all her stories, laughed and cried with her,” he smiles a little, because on the good days, his time with her was beautiful, too. “I visited her every week, before you,” he turns a little more toward Bucky, and the first thing he notices is Bucky’s pulse at the neck: heavy. Steve only realizes his own is just as leaden when he swallows.

“Still went whenever I could, up to the end.”

Bucky’s eyes slip from watching him for just the barest of seconds as he looks to the floor and crosses his arms tighter over his chest.

“Point being,” Steve sighs deeply, and it’s not a shaky thing; it’s a sure thing. “I said my goodbyes to her years ago, and so many years after what I would have been dropping in on while putting the Stone back, and...” Steve shakes his head, and shrugs, and turns toward Bucky who’s looking straight at him again, so intense with it that it sends a shiver down Steve’s spine, one that only shakes him all the deeper when Bucky’s lips part and he speaks:

“You owed her a dance, though.”

Right. Right, and the look in Bucky’s eyes from before, from catching him on the platform, the one that hasn’t gone away for all that he’s hiding it as best he can: that look is made of sound now. That look is found in words.

“And I gave her one,” Steve tells him, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips; “a particularly lucid day in 2013. She was only strong enough to stand upright and sway a bit, but that was probably for the best,” Steve chuckles, just a little. “Didn’t step on her toes.” 

“You tell her that?” Bucky asks, and Steve meets his eyes and there’s a little softness, there. There’s a little joy that peeks out.

Steve lets the grin that tugs grow full.

“She laughed.”

And Bucky smiles too, just a little.

And Steve thinks maybe that’s enough, maybe he’s done enough to prove that he means to be here, and never meant anything else, and—

“You could have gone back further.”

Steve seems to be wrong a lot, these days. Steve seems to have forgotten everything he knew about Bucky in the five years he’d suffered without him, too overwhelmed now by the fact that he was _here_.

“No I couldn’t have,” Steve answers, though he knows—and on this, he’s pretty sure he’s right—that he’s answering the question and not _the question_: “the jumps were preprogrammed.” He snorts and quirks a brow in Bucky’s direction: 

“Think I know enough about that shit to figure it out on the fly, without throwing myself into like, prehistoric times or something?”

Bucky snickers, even if it’s only half-hearted—if that.

“Death by dinosaur is maybe the _only_ thing I haven’t worried about taking you,” and something in Steve snags, latches onto the way Bucky phrases it: _taking_ you—

“Do you wish you could have?” Bucky says, before Steve can inspect exactly what feels so ineffable in his chest. “Gone right back to where you…”

Steve doesn’t have to inspect anything, though, to know his answer to that:

“No.” 

Bucky blinks, and then frowns, weight shifting as he straightens out of his lean against the wall. 

“No?”

“No,” Steve says again, and hopes it sounds as certain as it is, as _he_ is, because this is the question Bucky’s been trying to ask, isn’t it; this is the question that had been in his eyes and his words and his shaking hands on Steve’s shoulders. 

This is the question that counts. 

“I’m not that man anymore, the man who she could have loved,” Steve says it like it’s fact, because that’s damn well what it is. 

“And I’m not the man who could love her,” and that he says with real feeling, because he thinks it might be the most important part, and maybe he didn’t think about it as much as he should have because _he’d_ come to terms with that much years ago: “not like that.”

Bucky just stares at him with that same intensity, unflinching, and Steve feels like he needs more than that, needs to _get_ more than that from Bucky, needs to prove something to him that maybe Steve won’t know until it’s done, but it has to happen.

All he knows for certain is that he cannot get this wrong.

“There was a time where we could have given it a go, where we had an opportunity to try,” Steve says, turning fully now and talking to Bucky straight on, catching his eyes and bearing the weight of what they say that words can’t hold. 

“But time’s not,” Steve pauses, trying to figure out how to phrase it. “Time’s not just years, y’now? Time is what time _does_, to you, how you change, how it changes you and what happens _to_ change you, and who you change with and for,” and Steve feels something magnetic when he stares into Bucky’s unwavering gaze; something slots into place when he says it out loud, and Bucky’s there to hear it, because Steve has changed.

Steve has changed _so much_—

“You can’t go back,” Steve says, and his voice is softer, gentler without his permission but it’s no less certain. “And I,” Steve swallows when Bucky blinks slow, and his eyes look like the first hints of dusk. 

“I don’t want to anymore,” he confesses, and for all the weight of Bucky’s stare, Steve feels lighter for speaking the words. “All I’ve been doing is living in regret for the past, for as long as I’ve been here, after the ice. For the things I missed. For the things couldn’t fix, or else, couldn’t fix soon enough,” his voice his gets tight, but he makes himself, he _makes_ himself keep looking at Bucky because Bucky’s so silent, Bucky’s so still and if Steve loses sight of him for a second all the things he’s been regretting might consume him, here and now: “For the things I couldn't stop, couldn’t change, and I—” 

His breath catches before his voice can crack; he takes a long strain of seconds to just watch Bucky: his chest rising and falling. Real. _Real_.

He bites down on his lower lip, _hard_, to try and prove he isn’t dreaming as he just watches that goddamn precious chest rise and fall, and he wonders if Bucky ever felt this enamored with that simple motion when they were young, when he’d worried over Steve every winter, every too-muggy summer, even—but then, Bucky’s still watching him now like he’s an improbable vision, and Steve only knows that nothing feels real, save for Bucky breathing, but that his heart trips when he blinks and he can’t see it, he can’t _see_ it—

“The person I was then is a person I don’t recognize,” Steve says, eyes never leaving Bucky’s chest for it. “Not necessarily for good, or bad. Just don’t know him,” he pauses, and the breath _he_ takes is shaky. 

“Don’t know how much of him was even _me_, after I got so caught up in the mantle, the shield,” he admits, something that maybe he was the last person to realize, to see. “Hell, seeing myself in 2012, I didn’t know that man, either.”

Steve leans forward, and the pitch of his body gravitates ever so slightly toward where Bucky stands: automatic.

“Kinda wish I could have seen myself a few years later, though,” he murmurs, studies his hands because he can hear Bucky’s breathing now, and he can focus on it without watching Bucky for proof of life. “Just to,” he tilts his head and catches Bucky’s eye in the corner of his own: holds it close as he can: 

“To compare. How much of me came back when you did.”

Steve follows the way Bucky’s throat works around the words he hears; something warm and terrifying runs through Steve for it, and he swallows hard, too.

“I haven’t been able to just be me for a long time, for so many reasons,” Steve tells him, and wonders if this is the first step toward that unthinkable thing, finding a life to live. “I think I forgot who _me_ was, and I’m not sure I could even tell you who me _is_, here and now.”

“I can.” Bucky’s answer is immediate, earnest; eyes narrowed. Steve smiles, softer and more natural than anything he feels like he knows.

“I think what I want is to work on getting to know the man I am now, see what his life’s like,” Steve says slowly, like he’s trying out what the syllables taste like, whether he can stomach them. So far, so good. “What his future holds.”

Bucky’s eyes on him are still sharp and wide and taking in every angle, every moment, every space between heartbeats. He exhales long and slow, and then says:

“I think dinner’s ready.”

Steve takes a second for it to sink in, and to recognize that Bucky’s not going to move first, so Steve gets to his feet and starts to walk past him, but as soon as he’s even with Bucky, Bucky moves, and their shoulders touch as they walk, when they move just so and Steve feels something in him ease that he didn’t realize was waiting for this.

Just this.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Bucky can’t keep his eyes off Steve, neither of them mention it. If other people notice, they don’t mention it either.

If Bucky can’t keep his eyes off Steve, neither of them mention it. If other people notice, they don’t mention it either. 

It’s a comfort, actually, and maybe that says more than it should; Bucky’s gaze on him in every possible moment, every instant his attention isn’t required elsewhere, is warm on Steve’s skin but then deeper than that: a balm in his blood that runs through the whole of him, makes him feel safe in a way he’d never have admitted in another life, another time but falls fully into now, because that gaze is unwavering and still feels like wonder, like disbelief and maybe gratitude and Steve still feels a little crushed that he’d given Bucky reason to doubt him—or at the very least, to think that Steve would have done anything so drastic without telling him, asking his opinion, talking it out with his closest friend, the better half of his soul: that he’d even consider leaving without saying _goodbye_, if he considered leaving at all, that _’til the end of the line_ was a promise that only lasted so long, that only weathered so much when it had already weathered _this much_—

It’s a balm, and Steve revels in it, and some days it’s the only thing that keeps his knees from buckling, that gives him the strength to get through what comes after, what faces the world in the wake of everything, what faces _him_ in the aftermath. It’s always been Bucky, though, that gets him through the worst, so it doesn’t really feel strange at all; it mostly just feels like home.

And if Steve can’t let Bucky out of his immediate vicinity, because the first waves of shock and loss are starting to give way to deep sorrow and long grieving, and he’d settled into an ever-present and unwavering _ache_, the phantom of the last five years of mourning and hollowness; if Steve can’t breathe quite right if Bucky’s not at least making _sound_, not himself _breathing_ loud enough to track, not giving proof of life in some tangible, traceable way close enough for Steve to hear: Steve’s not going to apologize for it. Bucky doesn’t seem to mind Steve lingering close by, and doesn’t question Steve’s flimsy excuses—Steve only bothers giving them for the first week or so, and then simply stays, and it becomes the rule. Bucky usually knew Steve better than Steve knew himself in these sorts of things, anyway—Steve figures he understands.

And if they end up in the same bed at night without asking, agreeing, or talking about it at all; without planning it or thinking it through as anything but the obvious, anything but the most natural given in the entire world: then Steve stares at Bucky the first night after he returns the Stones, and Bucky stares back, and finally Bucky sighs and something in Steve trembles because he’s afraid they’ve read each other wrong but Bucky simply asks him:

“What do you need?”

And Steve can’t say it, doesn’t know exactly what it _is_, even, _to_ say, but Bucky once again knows him, in this, and he reaches for Steve’s hand and brings it to his lips, and that’s never happened before but it, too, feels right. He pulls Steve into him and wraps his limbs around Steve tight, and settles Steve against his chest so his ear can trace the air in his lungs and the beat of his heart, so close he can _feel_ it and Steve unravels for it, tears soaking Bucky’s shirt and somehow he never lets Steve go as he strips it off and settles Steve back onto his bare skin and presses lips to the top of Steve’s head and just holds him, holds him and breathes, and his heart beats, and it doesn’t stop, and Steve calms eventually. Steve breathes too, eventually.

Bucky doesn’t waver, because he never has.

If that’s how they spend every night, less like a rule and more like a truth, then that’s just the way the world works, now. In the midst of so many things that seem in need of fixing, this is just one thing that comes to be that’s entirely, inarguably _right_.

________________

Rebuilding is tough, but somehow humanity still surprises Steve, when he thought he was far past the point where that was possible.

Resources are scarce but people do as they’ve always done: panic, squabble, resort to violence, and then stop long enough to realize they’ve got to band together if they’re ever going to fix the problem.

Relief efforts were largely halved before but they’re well practiced by now, and plenty of people volunteer, from those who’d been at it before and those who are newly inspired to get involved, to those who were gone and are eager to lend a hand in this brave new, if wildly emotionally-drained and desperate world. Unsurprisingly, Wakanda takes a leading role in the global effort: War Dogs had remained deployed in every nation, new recruits taking the place of those lost, and now with those returned, they work tirelessly to shore up the loose ends of power plays, of those who took advantage of the devastation for the sake of their own gain. Shuri turns the tables in the realm of resources and supplies, deploying advanced food production methods that had been in their infancy upon her disappearance but that she works to at least stabilise and render functional to the benefit of the world at large. Bruce takes over Tony’s humanitarian research, with Pepper’s blessing, and they make the most of the tech in their reach to help: and on the whole, it works. 

Eventually, the course seems to be set toward rebuilding the world closer to 2018—the last time the world was stable, at least by comparison—and Steve’s not opposed to that plan. He recognizes how much suffering and healing and loss it might seem to ignore, but Steve knows in his bones those things will never go away, regardless of what the world looks like. Those feelings will only die with every single person who was left behind, no matter who stands restored to their worlds, less an echo in their hearts and now something solid, something you can touch rather than lament only in memory.

And Steve’s not sorry that he’s grateful to retreat to a world that made at least some sense, to rebuild from a point that _everyone_ remembers, given that they’d largely spent five years staunching a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding, living half-lives and stumbling around starting anew. Steve’s not sorry, now that he has everything he needs back at his side, to find himself in that space and regroup, relearn his own soul because it’s resurfaced in the marrow of his bones, and he’s ready now to follow where it leads.

He isn’t sorry. Maybe he should be, but he’s not.

He helps with the efforts, largely simple things, practical things: the organizing of supplies and the renovating of long-abandoned factories, office buildings. He does everything in his power to give his brute strength and tactical experience to every task he meets until one evening, both of them bone-tired and musky with sweat, Bucky sits Steve down on the sofa in the living room, shoulder to shoulder and takes Steve’s calloused hands in his own, rubbing circles around the knuckles with both metal and flesh thumbs alike. It sends a shiver up Steve’s spine and he’s not sure if he’s able to hide it, not sure if Bucky notices it.

He’s not sure that he cares.

“You need to sit this one out, Steve,” Bucky says, and Steve’s default response is to protest, vehemently, but Bucky’s hands on his own are strong, and firm, and Steve pauses to soak it in a moment too long, and Bucky takes the opening.

“These hands have held enough,” and Bucky’s hands slide up Steve’s arms to grasp hard at his shoulders;

“And these shoulders have carried more than their share of the burden for far too long.”

Steve wants to respond to that, to make some rebuttal, but mostly he’s really enjoying what those hands are doing to said shoulders, kneading gently seemingly without Bucky’s awareness or permission. The sound of relief that escapes him must sound like assent, though, and Bucky’s voice is soothing, and he’s so close, and it feels, it feels...

“You’ve got backup, now,” Bucky speaks in earnest; “reinforcements. We’re ready, and we’re willing, and we’re _here_,” his left hand travels up Steve’s neck and cups his cheek, the warmth of the vibranium never ceasing to amaze Steve, and he leans into the touch. “We’re here.”

Because Bucky knows Steve needs to hear it, whispers it at night when Steve trembles in his arms, still. Bucky knows, and Steve can’t imagine what he’d do, what he’s done for so long, without him.

“Put us in, coach,” Bucky tilts Steve’s head upward with a finger on his chin, and his eyes smile where his lips don’t, and it’s almost the same for the glint in them, warm in Steve’s belly; “and take a breather, yeah?”

And Steve’s never been one to back down from a fight, never, and Bucky knows not to ask that much of him. But a break, a reprieve: even Steve can see the logic in that.

Bucky’s hand is back on his cheek, a silent entreaty, and Steve turns his face to kiss that palm, and it’s unspoken, and unprecedented, but Bucky just cups his face all the more tenderly.

And that’s that.


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What?” Steve asks. They’re sitting on the ground close enough to touch the lake, to dangle feet to the mud below, but Bucky’s eyes are fixed on the bench further up.
> 
> The bench where, before, when he came back, where they’d seen—
> 
> “They went to talk to him,” Bucky whispers, voice from far away. “I couldn’t.”
> 
> Before Steve can think of a response to that, Bucky’s eyes are on him:
> 
> “I’m sorry.”
> 
> Steve frowns, and leans in toward him. “For what?”
> 
> Bucky sighs.
> 
> “For not going to see you, to say,” he shakes his head, and clears his throat, but it’s a shaky sort of thing, too much trying to hide behind it for it to hold steady. 
> 
> “To say thank you, and how much you mean to me. If that was you, and you’d stayed behind and then come back all those years later, and he was all we had of you, and I couldn’t bring myself to _go_ to you, however and whenever you are, every time—”
> 
> “Look at me.”
> 
> Steve’s voice is more of a demand. He can’t bear to hear Bucky’s voice sound like that another second, another syllable. He can’t _bear_ it. 
> 
> “I wouldn’t have done that.”

Bucky knows that Steve had been doing grief support; asks if Steve might want to go back to it. It’s an idle question, asked in the safety of Bucky’s arms in their bed one night. He’s carding fingers through Steve’s hair and it’s only that touch that keeps Steve from falling apart at just the thought, the memory.

“I wasn’t any good at it.”

Bucky huffs lightly.

“I highly doubt that.”

“I was selfish with it,” Steve says, eyes trained on the darkness surrounding them, voice soft like it makes a difference, like he can whisper out some secret between them. 

“Pretended to be anything but, but I was _selfish_,” Steve shakes his head into Bucky’s chest; “and when I told them we all needed to move on, I couldn’t.” His voice catches, and his eyes sting, because failing in that was maybe understandable; failing in that’s something he’s not sorry for, but the rest of it—

“When I tried to show them understanding, empathy, I couldn’t use my own pain,” Steve chokes out; “couldn’t even meet them where they stood.” Bucky’s hand is wrapped around him, like always, and he gropes for it blindly, grasping it tight.

“I used her, Buck,” he grits out, because he’s never said it, maybe never fully admitted it, and it fucking _hurts_. “I used her and talked about back then when what they needed was _right now_,” and he’s caught in it, for a terrible second; caught in when it _was_ right now, before they fixed it. He’s caught for a second in a world where there was nothing he could do to fix anything at all.

“I _used_ her, because I couldn’t say it out loud, I couldn’t talk about what I saw, what it felt like, couldn’t talk about my friends, my...” and it’s not the first time that Steve doesn’t know the word for the man whose arms he rests in—it’s not the first time, and Steve wonders if he’ll ever find it; wonders if it matters either way as he moves his face closer to Bucky’s beating heart, as the tears start to fall and the voice from his throat sounds like it should bleed to rip out and bare:

“I couldn’t even say your goddamn _name_—”

“Shh, Steve, Stevie,” Bucky’s there in an instant, his words certain, a solid place to land: Bucky murmurs, and stops carding his hair and just holds Steve’s head close to his chest, like he knows that just breathing is the best soothing he can give. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Steve says, pressing closer into Bucky’s hold: vulnerable, and weak here in a way he’s never been, in a way he could never be anywhere else, in any other place or time.

“She’d forgive you,” and of course Bucky finds that ache, of course he looks to cauterize that wound first. “She’d understand, and she’d forgive you.” Bucky tucks Steve up under his chin and holds his lips against Steve’s hair and just breathes there for a long time; a long time. 

“She wouldn’t want this hanging over you,” he whispers, and his breath in Steve’s matted strands feels like a prayer, a benediction: “she wouldn’t want this making you hurt.”

And somehow, that’s what Steve needs to hear. Somehow, from Bucky’s lips pressed against him, Steve believes it. He didn’t realize how heavy it was, until it starts to ease away.

“I couldn’t admit you were gone,” Steve whispers, because to put any more force into the words would take away from all the energy he’s directing into not breaking down entirely. Steve chokes out; “I couldn’t, I _wouldn’t_ move on and I was a liar, I’m a _liar_—”

“You didn’t move on,” Bucky affirms, but there’s steel in his tone; “even when you probably should have. And we’re _here_ because of it,” and Steve can’t keep the sob out of the exhale that comes because he’s surrounded in full by the _proof_ of that very fact.

“I am so sorry for what it did to you, for how much it hurt, how much I know it _still_ hurts,” Bucky tells him, soft and glazed with his own hurting, but it’s hurting for _Steve_, and it’s fueled of something bright. 

“But I’m not sorry to be here,” Bucky tells him simply, and holds him a little tighter. “I’m grateful, so fuckin’ grateful, Steve, and so’s the world, so’s the goddamn universe.”

And Steve shakes a little, but Bucky braces him, presses him tight to his body, to his warmth:

“We’re not gone,” he breathes against Steve’s ear: and then a promise, the same words but this time they thread inside Steve’s blood:

“_We’re_ not gone.”

________________

As if to prove it, to underscore all the _life_ that remains after so much otherwise, Bucky makes a point in his week, every week, to visit the Starks. 

Steve doesn’t know if it’s a debt he feels the need to pay—Tony hadn’t said outright that he’d forgiven Bucky, but the fact that he’d forgiven Steve to the extent that he did was indication enough—but he thinks it’s more just Bucky being _Bucky_, because charmer though he always was, and willing to do whatever necessary to scrape by, James Barnes had a heart of gold, and he loved people, and more than that, he had a particular way of finding the people most in need of _love_.

Case in point, the vision in front of Steve just now, melting his goddamn heart: Morgan in Bucky’s lap, tracing her way across the joins in Bucky’s left arm while she tells a story about the stuffed animal with a holo-screen built in where she can talk to her mom while Pepper is at the office, where she’d had to step back into a more visible role after Tony’s…

Well.

“Uncle Sam is going to lose,” Morgan interrupts her story to peek over Bucky’s shoulder toward the grill. “Happy is the best steak-maker.”

Steve snorts as he sketches the basic pose they’d both held before Morgan had redirected their attention; they’re beautiful, lit by the sun against the water, and Steve wants to finish documenting it later.

“Don’t let Sam hear you call him that,” Steve murmurs under his breath as he smudges out some of the graphite to remember the direction of the light—because Sam’s particularly sensitive about how said title, which he loves on its own, fits all too easily to mock alongside the new red-white-and-blue look.

Which may be partly Bucky’s fault, because Bucky finds it _hilarious_.

“You’ll make my cheeseburger though, right?” Morgan turns to Bucky, face serious like the fate of the world depends on Bucky making her food, and it might, really, because it’s been long established now that Bucky is the cheeseburger-maker-in-residence to one Morgan Stark, only to be replaced by Happy in an emergency. 

Meaning: any time Bucky is not around, but Morgan wants a burger.

“Of course, Ganny-girl,” Bucky says, the nickname causing a satisfied smile to cross Morgan’s face. “But I’ve got something for you in the meantime,” he reaches behind him into the cooler they’d toted along and motions to her conspiratorially to look inside. 

“Ooooo!” she brightens, but quickly hides her excitement just a little to test Bucky appropriately: “Do you have the grape kind?”

Bucky puts a hand to his chest and feigns the pain of offense.

“Do I have the—” he stutters in faux-shock. “What kind of question is _that_?”

Morgan giggles, and grabs a purple juice pop.

“You’ll spoil my dinner,” she chides him delightedly, peeling the popsicle open. 

“Well, I mean,” Bucky chews his lip; “if you don’t think you’ll have an _appetite_ for my delicious hamburgers…”

Morgan realizes her error immediately, screwing up her face to try and save both her treat and her meal.

“I…” she sighs deeply, putting on the full performance of graciousness; “I _think_ I could do both. If I try _real_ hard.” 

Bucky laughs, and kisses her cheek sloppily before urging her toward the house.

“Why don’t you go help Uncle Sam out over there,” he suggests; “I think he’s losing real bad.”

“Don’t call him that,” Steve singsongs a bit; it’s maybe a _little_ funny, and Steve’s much more concerned with getting the shading off the lake just right.

“And don’t forget to ask if he brought Redwing for you to play with!” Bucky calls after Morgan, and then settles back, throat bared as he leans to soak up the rays.

Steve surreptitiously flips the page of his sketchbook and starts to draw the lines of his neck, his jaw, the softness of his features…

It’s when those features tighten that Steve pauses. They’re not supposed to look like that.

He sets his pencil down.

“What?” he asks. They’re sitting on the ground close enough to touch the lake, to dangle feet to the mud below, but Bucky’s eyes are fixed on the bench further up.

The bench where, before, when he came back, where they’d seen—

“They went to talk to him,” Bucky whispers, voice from far away. “I couldn’t.”

Before Steve can think of a response to that, Bucky’s eyes are on him, wide and filled with so fucking _much_:

“I’m sorry.”

Steve frowns, and leans in toward him. “For what?”

Bucky sighs.

“For not going to see you, to say,” he shakes his head, and clears his throat, but it’s a shaky sort of thing, too much trying to hide behind it for it to hold steady. 

“To say thank you, and how much you mean to me,” Bucky’s voice starts to break, and he looks away, out over the water to say the rest. 

“If that was you, and you’d stayed behind and then come back all those years later, and he was all we had of you, and I couldn’t bring myself to _go_ to you, however and whenever you are, every time—”

“Look at me.”

Steve’s voice is more of a demand. He can’t bear to hear Bucky’s voice sound like that another second, another syllable. He can’t _bear_ it. 

“I wouldn’t have done that.” 

Steve says with it certainty, with a clarity of purpose he hopes is beyond misconstruing, because he needs this doubt in Bucky to die, he needs to kill it and fill the space with only warmth and hope and all the things Bucky’s deserved his whole life and gotten far too little of. 

“And you didn’t go, because you knew that, knew _I_ wouldn’t _do_ that,” Steve says, and moves the smallest bit to gather Bucky’s hands in his own without thinking, without hesitating long enough to even pretend to. 

“You knew whatever they saw, or thought they saw?” Steve scoffs a little, and maybe it’s a hateful sound, and maybe that’s exactly what Steve means for it to be. “Some version of me who left, and stayed behind, and then had the fucking _nerve_ to come back, like _that_?” Steve shakes his head, because even now he can’t make heads or tails of it, can’t make sense of it any more than Bruce can, and Bruce has made a little bit of an obsession out of it, to be fair.

“You know me,” Steve squeezes Bucky’s hands in his. “I would _never_,” he waits until Bucky meets his eyes and holds them just as tight: “_ever_, do that. So whatever they saw, and whatever that was,” Steve shakes his head. 

“Whatever that was, you didn’t go because you knew it couldn’t be _me_.”

“I should have been there,” Bucky says immediately, like the words were waiting behind his teeth the whole time; “no matter _what_ you it was.” 

“I’m not convinced it _was_ me,” Steve tells him, because how could they know for sure, anyway? Nothing nefarious seems to have come of it, but it could have been anything, or anyone; the universe was vast and largely a mystery, and Steve’s working hard at making his peace with that and focusing instead on the world in front of him. 

“Because regardless of what choices I cannot imagine _ever_ making,” Steve says, his whole heart behind it; “what I know I wouldn’t do, at the core of me, to the point where anything less would ruin everything that _makes_ me, _me_,” and something must flare in his eyes, at that, because Bucky’s hands turn ever so slightly to grasp Steve’s in kind, as tight as Steve is grasping his.

“I wouldn’t lose you, and find you, and then leave you,” Steve breathes out, holds Bucky’s gaze and doesn't blink lest Steve lose him in the moment his eyes are closed; “only to come back to the you I’d just _got_ back, as an old man breathing his last.” Bucky’s breath catches, and Steve thinks he’s hit the mark: that’s the fear Bucky’s still holding on to; that’s the thing Bucky still aches with. Steve, at the end, coming back to say goodbye to a life they lived apart, when all Steve’s ever known, ever dreamed of, one way or another, was a life with Bucky at his side.

“I’d want you to be there at the end,” he confesses, not that it can possibly come as a surprise; “but _that_, it’s just,” he catches Bucky’s eyes again and hopes the pain it causes just to _think_ of is something Bucky can read in him and _understand_: 

“That’s cruel, Buck, that’s _cruel_, and the day I become cruel is the day I’m not Steve Rogers,” and that’s the plainest truth he can spell out; that’s the reason he tries not to think too hard about it, because it doesn’t add up and he doesn’t ever _want_ it to. 

“And I wouldn’t _want_ you to go to that man,” Steve adds, to make sure the point’s made clear. “I wouldn’t want for you to have to be anywhere near someone like that.” And he wouldn’t, he doesn’t, because Bucky deserves more. Deserves better.

“Uncle Bucky!”

They both turn, and Steve doesn’t let go of Bucky’s hands because Bucky doesn’t let go of his.

“Time to make my cheeseburger!”

And Bucky chuckles, calling back that he’s on his way, and before he stands he brings Steve’s knuckles to his mouth, brushes a featherlight touch there and breathes, and it’s not a common thing, though it’s not the first time it’s happened. It’s also not the first time it’s left Steve’s hand tingling in the aftermath, his body set alight for the touch of those lips.

He grabs his sketchbook and follows toward the house, thinking of jawlines and the stretch of a throat in monochrome and the press of a plush, chapped kiss to his skin, and he nearly trips on the way up for how far his mind is from the simple task of walking.


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And Steve recognizes the feeling in his chest, in his whole body, buzzing and floating: and suddenly Steve understands what it is because he can only look at Bucky’s blown pupils and his full lips and his tongue sneaking out to lick them, his throat working around a swallow and he is beautiful. He’s goddamn beautiful and Steve understands in a single moment between too-fast heartbeats that this feeling isn’t new. This feeling is built into his bones. This is where he was always supposed to end up, but then, it may be where he’s always _been_, and there were just so many things in the way before; distractions.
> 
> The only distraction, now, is how hard his pulse is pumping as he waits for Bucky to answer.

They end up stumbling almost unexpectedly into the white-picket-fence, apple-pie life they used to dream of.

Except it’s not like that at all.

They need a home base, can’t keep hopping between Stark-owned properties and hotels. In the end, they buy an old farmhouse upstate, converted and renovated and far too fancy for either of them but somehow together, it’s fine—more than. 

“Pepper gave me a shortlist of properties,” Bucky tells him, “but I picked this one out, so if you hate it, we can keep looking—”

“Naw,” Steve says with a grin; he doesn’t much care where they live, as long as _they_ live there. “I’ll just blame you if I hate it.”

Bucky snorts. “Punk.”

Steve still gets a little drunk on how that single word makes him feel, now that it’s back in the world. He’s beginning to think it’s never going to go away, and he thinks he’s entirely okay with that.

The both of them feel just a little off-kilter signing the papers on something so permanent, the implications of it slightly dizzying. And Steve doesn’t hate the house at all, can’t even pretend to so as to needle Bucky: Steve goes to the glass-walled enclosure in the back of the house like he’s drawn there magnetically, intrinsically, imagining the way the light must hit and stream in, the way that maybe he could make it into a studio, and—

“I think my memory’s pretty solid, at this point,” Bucky comes up behind him; “but if I forgot anything…”

As if he could have, with the spread that’s waiting for Steve. There’s everything he could possibly want, possibly need: easels and boards and canvases of every imaginable size, sketchbooks of every weight and tooth he could wish for. Dry and wet media in all the same colors he used to favor plus a million more; graphite and charcoal and oils and pastels, watercolors, acrylics and some of those fancy markers he’d read about when he was first out of the ice and trying to reclaim something too far lost, but that now he feels an itch in his fingers to try, to learn, and it’s overwhelming, it’s perfect, it’s—

He turns to Bucky, and he can’t imagine what’s showing in his eyes because Bucky’s grow wide, and Steve reaches for him, and maybe he doesn’t even mean to pull him into a hug at all, maybe his hands were always looking to frame Bucky’s face and Steve doesn’t realize he’s breathing so hard, doesn’t realize his hands are trembling where his palms cover Bucky’s cheeks and then he’s asking:

“Okay?”

And Steve recognizes the feeling in his chest, in his whole body, buzzing and floating: and suddenly Steve understands what it is because he can only look at Bucky’s blown pupils and his full lips and his tongue sneaking out to lick them, his throat working around a swallow and he is beautiful. He’s goddamn beautiful and Steve understands in a single moment between too-fast heartbeats that this feeling isn’t new. This feeling is built into his bones. This is where he was always supposed to end up, but then, it may be where he’s always _been_, and there were just so many things in the way before; distractions.

The only distraction, now, is how hard his pulse is pumping as he waits for Bucky to answer.

Bucky’s mouth opens, moves, but there's no sound except a low sigh, and finally he nods, eyes caught in his Steve gaze or maybe it’s the other way around, it’s probably the other way around because Steve is caught by him and consumed and gratefully so, and Steve pulls him in and devours his lips like he was born for it, and Bucky tastes like the sunlight that Steve wants to paint him in, tastes like sugar and steel and resilience, the kind that’s built something strong and sure despite Bucky’s tendency toward brushing it off, his careful avoidance of the subject but Steve can trace that solidity with his tongue and integrate it into his body like a privilege. And when Bucky starts to lick into his mouth the same way, tasting and exploring and taking in as greedy as Steve if it’s even possible and oh, yes, _yes_: this is what Steve was born for. Bucky in his arms, beneath his hands and there to devour him and be devoured in kind with singular attention, orchestrated by the relentless, uncontrollable beat of two hearts and Steve thinks he might come apart for it, save that it’s what makes him. He’d said he wanted to learn who this Steve Rogers was.

But it turned out he’d always been this Steve Rogers, or else that’s what he believes, because he can’t imagine being more himself than he is here, pressed against Bucky so that their gasping lungs slide their chests together and their flavor is an endless wonder and that not-new feeling in Steve’s blood is met and answered and blown to pieces around a single word: yes.

Yes, yes, _yes_.

________________

That night, when they crawl into bed, they slide beneath the sheets the way they always do, always have, each on either side but that’s where it changes, that’s where it stops being familiar and instead responds to the cosmic shift that was their mouths pressed together and their hearts laid bare somewhere wordless and weighted, exchanged undeniably between the way they’d only pulled apart to gasp and stare at each other with the endless question, the wondering-awe of whether this was happening, whether this was real, whether after _all this time_—

Normally, they lie on their backs for minutes or moments, and breathe as separate pieces until one of them slides a hand across a shoulder or under a back and curls in, around, and then they breathe together. They fall asleep pressed close and know precisely when a dream turns dark, and then they hold tighter. Normally, they wake like that, one face pressed against a neck and one pair of hands crossed tight to hold another against a chest. 

Normally.

Bucky rolls immediately onto his side and Steve moves in response like an instinct, leaning into the splay of Bucky’s hand on his cheek and shivering at the touch of Bucky’s fingers on the hem of his shirt where they grasp and tug just a little on the fabric as he asks softly, eyes fixed on Steve’s:

“Okay?”

Steve’s heart kicks hard; he turns his face to Bucky’s touch at his jaw and speaks the only answer there is into Bucky’s skin:

“_Please_.”

Bucky keeps that palm just there, and Steve breathes heavy against it until Bucky has to shift to get Steve’s shirt over his head and then Steve’s pawing at Bucky’s shirt in kind, which Bucky lifts arms to shed readily. And then it’s hands, god, and mouths, everywhere they can possibly touch to map and mark and hold: Steve sucks the pulse in Bucky’s throat so hard he thinks he can taste it, runs his tongue along the grooves in Bucky’s left arm; Bucky thumbs Steve’s nipples unrepentantly and tongues Steve’s mouth like an artform, like he can coax the secrets of Steve’s heart and soul out and Steve believes in those moments that he can, and will, and does. 

Steve pushes Bucky’s briefs down from the back to cup his ass, massage the cheeks and trace the cleft and feel out the contours like he’s memorizing them for a sculpture, to replicate them perfectly from the way his fingers rest against the flesh, the muscle; Steve shudders terribly, uncontrollably as Bucky swirls fingertips through the fine hairs trailing down from Steve’s navel, and Bucky seems to anticipate that exact reaction as he presses a wide-mouthed grin to the middle of Steve’s collarbones and draws deft patterns further down, past Steve’s waistband and under, and oh god, oh _god_ the pressure of the heel of Bucky’s palm at the base of his cock is a revelation and a torment, and Bucky doesn’t move his hand as Steve’s own grab at the perfect globes of Bucky’s ass and squeeze for purchase more than pleasure, no: Bucky keeps the pressure steady and surges up to takes Steve’s mouth again, a hard, filthy kiss that drags open mouthed to zig-zag down between his pecs and circle open, teasing against his rubbed-raw nipples, drawing a hiss from between his teeth.

“Buck,” Steve moans, arching into the weight of Bucky’s hand and trying like hell to create some friction because it’s anguish and ecstacy, it’s zero to infinity in the space of a breath and Steve didn’t realize he could need this badly so fast except that maybe it’s not fast at all, maybe it’s a lifetime of wanting that’s finally finding its home and demanding its due: his heart’s pounding and his lungs are sore already, holy _fuck_ but Bucky’s thighs are as powerful as Steve’s ever fantasized them to be, and they hold him down and Bucky sets his own pace, and drives Steve mad just a little bit longer with the scrape of his teeth down Steve’s ribs, across every hard swath of his abs.

“Patience,” Bucky murmurs, hands firm on Steve’s biceps and reaching as he moves down, down, down until his hand frees Steve’s dick to curve upward and achingly hard, ready for Bucky’s lips that only take the length into his mouth for show before abandoning it without so much as hollowing his cheeks around it, and Steve whimpers when Bucky pulls off, but then his left hand takes Steve against the palm and weighs him almost casually for the space of two heartbeats before he slides up against Steve and cants his own hips, and Steve gasps for the feeling of Bucky’s erection against his own and Bucky curls his fingers around them both pressed alongside, the slickness from his mouth easing the way Bucky works them off as he splays his body over Steve’s chest to chest, as they pant into each other’s mouths desperately and Steve knows he won’t last, but from the twitch of Bucky’s cock against him Steve knows he’s not alone, and there’s a passing thrill at the idea he may never be alone again, in this or anything else until everything scatters and his mouth drops open around Bucky’s name and he comes, with Bucky following shortly after as if spurred to climax by the force of Steve’s own, and that’s fucking hot as hell, dry in Steve’s throat and heavy in his pulse as it pounds in the comedown.

“God,” Bucky exhales heavily, rolling off of Steve and letting his come-slick hand fall boneless, idly onto his chest, heaving as he breathes, “_Steve_,” like that name holds all things.

And no, no: it’s a different name that holds all things, but Steve can’t seem to speak at all, so he musters all the little energy left in him and grabs Bucky’s hand from Bucky own chest to brace against Steve’s instead, to feel the thrashing of his heart and the shortness of his breath and the depth of everything he feels telegraphed inside, and it’s sloppy, and shaky, and perfect, and Bucky’s hand feels like the world set right.

One they’ve caught their breaths they turn in tandem and kiss lazily, more aiming for each other’s lips than making real contact but it’s gorgeous and lazy and wonderful nonetheless. They fall asleep with foreheads bowed together and breath mingling and everything feeling complete, somehow, like the world was never whole until now.

It’s the best night’s sleep Steve’s ever had.


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part of Steve wants to ask why they didn’t do this sooner, because if Steve can trust the low hum of contentment at the base of his spine, in the pump of his blood, then this is everything he could ask for, everything he could want and it’s _his_; part of him wants to ask why they ever bothered to wait, but Steve knows why: war, poverty, illness; laws that taught you how to hate your own heart before you even knew that’s what you’d done; and ice. 
> 
> So much ice.

When Steve wakes, it’s to a flat palm, familiar not because the metal can only belong to one person but because the pressure, the _feeling_ of it resonates in Steve’s blood and bones: when Steve wakes, it’s to a flat palm dragging up and down his chest, almost delicate. Almost reverent.

The grin that curls his lips seeps into his voice before he opens his eyes.

“Morning,” Steve breathes, and brings his fingers to lace through Bucky’s before he glances up through his lashes to catch Bucky’s gaze, and oh: oh, this is what it feels like. This is what it means to feel like you belong, like you’re where you’re meant to be, doing what you’re built for and breathing air in a cadence that makes sense. This is what living means when it’s done _right_.

Bucky’s warm alongside him, and his hand is held loose against Steve’s chest to rise and fall gently, and that’s _right_.

Part of Steve wants to ask why they didn’t do this sooner, because if Steve can trust the low hum of contentment at the base of his spine, in the pump of his blood, then this is everything he could ask for, everything he could want and it’s _his_; part of him wants to ask why they ever bothered to wait, but Steve knows why: war, poverty, illness; laws that taught you how to hate your own heart before you even knew that’s what you’d done; and ice. 

So much ice.

But Steve looks at Bucky, drinks him in slow and smooth and dares to swallow around the word _forever_ before he lets words—ones can actually grasp firmly and speak—spill out:

“God, you’re beautiful.”

Bucky huffs a breath, rolling off next to Steve and staring at the ceiling. Steve follows, propping up next to him now to keep watching him, unable to stop smiling just because Bucky can’t seem to stop, either.

“What?” Steve asks, because there’s something unnamable around the edges of Bucky’s grin, and Steve wants to know it, wants to map it and catalogue it and fit it in his chest alongside everything he knows about James Buchanan Barnes so that his pulse can beat it through his whole body every second of every day.

“_Beautiful_,” Bucky repeats; doesn’t try to dodge Steve’s questioning but answers with a sort of sardonic kind of wonder.

“What, is handsome better?” Steve needles, daring to kiss the corner of Bucky’s lips, which only stretch further around a smile that’s threatening to break open and shine full. “Stunning?”

Bucky laughs sharp and high, just a single sound but it sends something joyful spilling inside Steve’s veins, nonetheless.

“No one’s ever called me that, is all,” Bucky says softly, his eyes wide as they hold Steve’s steady. “Not that they would have,” he adds: not deprecating—but not _not_, either.

“I’ve always thought you were,” Steve says, determined to make sure Bucky knows it, and determined to take his surprise away from doubt and place it into practicality, if the doubt insists on existing at all. “But you’re right. Growing up, you wouldn’t, I mean you’d never say…” 

Steve shakes his head, and realizes in that moment just how much of his life, just how much of the inner parts of himself, have been predicated on the fact that Bucky would know them, would see them through Steve’s own fumbling and missed marks.

Steve breathes, bites his lip, and Bucky’s still just watching him like he’s a fucking _find_, and Steve’s so far past a lucky sonuvabitch he can’t see it, can’t hear it or touch it or remember its taste but he will be grateful for it until the day he dies because Steve sees himself in those eyes: known. 

He’s beginning to understand how many lies he’s been telling himself, about how he was alright, how he was okay, how everything was fine, how they needed to move on, and—

Seeing himself so clearly in Bucky’s own gaze, for _knowing_ Steve so true: it’s a revelation.

Steve reaches out to trail a finger down Bucky’s jawline and he feels like it should be trembling, but it isn’t. 

Maybe that speaks louder, actually. Maybe that means more.

“We wouldn’t have said it, then,” Steve finally picks around the words to make something sensible; “so guys like us—”

“There _are_ no guys like us,” Bucky interrupts, brow quirked.

“Fair point,” Steve concedes, but he’s glad for it because oh; oh, that’s even _better_, because:

“But then, if there’s no one like us, that means there’s no rules,” Steve’s grin curls a little sly; “no rules apply.”

“Not that you’d ever follow ‘em anyway—” Bucky starts, but Steve’s fast, and he captures Bucky’s lips unapologetically, desperate and full and Bucky’s leans up into Steve’s mouth and opens his for Steve to explore, dragging teeth across Steve’s swollen lower lip as they pull away.

“So,” Steve says, a little breathless as he traces the bow of Bucky’s lips, and relishes the feeling of the last tendrils of his panting breath as he settles, too. 

“You’re beautiful,” Steve says again, because they exist beyond any rules; they are something entirely new. He cups Bucky’s cheek and marvels at him, mesmerized; damn near speechless as he whispers out for the wonder of it: 

“Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t look in the mirror very often, then?” Bucky volleys, but it’s too soft to pack any weight, and his hand’s reaching for the back of Steve’s neck and drawing him down to kiss again, this time slow and languid and aching and warm.

“You’re like the sun,” Bucky breathes against Steve’s lips, and Steve’s too close to focus on Bucky’s gaze but he doesn’t want to draw away any further, wants to be close and wants to feel like Bucky is everywhere alongside being everything, so Steve just leans and kisses a line down Bucky’s jaw, nuzzling the pulse in Bucky’s throat before he just gives in to the draw of Bucky’s body and envelopes him, splayed over him and smiling into his shoulder as Bucky’s arms come around him, anchoring him firm and safe.

They’re quiet, like that, bare flesh on bare flesh and Steve revels in Bucky’s lungs being strong enough to lift Steve’s weight where he lies against Bucky’s chest, where he closes his eyes and just listens and feels the way that Bucky breathes like it’s the whole world.

And for Steve, whether he’s ever said as much or not: it is.

He’s ensconced in the sensation of Bucky’s touch, of Bucky around him and beneath him and Bucky’s legs moving to twine with his own, knees hooked over Steve’s thighs like he knows Steve aches for it, to be subsumed by Bucky, to be wrapped in him and maybe always has; like Bucky knows that something in Steve has been waiting his entire life for this dam to break and give them _this_, or else: hoping for it. Praying for it.

Or maybe, just maybe: Bucky needs it, wants it, aches for it, too.

Bucky leans and presses a kiss to the crown of Steve’s head, reaching to tap questioningly at the quirk of Steve’s lips pressed against Bucky’s sternum, wondering what’s going through Steve’s head to merit the hint of a grin. 

“Just thinking,” Steve murmurs into Bucky’s skin, burrowing a little further in. “It’s been,” he sighs out slow: “god, I don’t know if I _remember_ when I last felt like I was home,” and that’s it. That’s precisely the word. He knew it, in his heart he _knew_ it and that’s why nothing’s been right in so long, so _long_—

“It’s ours,” Bucky says, and he’s talking about the house. He’s talking about a place. “We’ll—”

“Buck.”

Steve forces himself to extricate from the full press of Bucky’s heat against his chest to slide to his knees, pressed either side of Bucky’s hips, and take Bucky’s face in his hands, tracing his cheekbones, his jawline, the pillow of his lips with careful, purposeful thumbs. Bucky’s mouth drops open just a little, tongue teasing Steve’s touch but that’s not what Steve’s doing. That’s not what this means.

Bucky’s eyes meet Steve’s eventually, asking just for a moment before they get wide, and Steve smiles at him softly: Bucky sees what Steve needs him to, and understands because what Steve knew in his heart?

“I’m _home_.”

It was Bucky. Always Bucky. Only Bucky. Fuck a city, or a country, or a tower or a house or a hut. Fuck the trappings and the setting, a roof over their heads. Nothing made any of it a home, save for Bucky.

And Steve feels something heavy he didn’t realize was weighing him down; he feels it lifting as Bucky reads that truth from Steve’s eyes, Steve’s body, and takes it in.

“Me too,” Bucky whispers against Steve’s thumb on his bottom lip. “Me too.”

And Steve leans down to replace his touch with his mouth and that’s it; that’s it.

_That’s_ home.


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve doesn’t even _want_ to put up a token protest when Sam slaps the table between them enthusiastically, celebrating Steve’s apparently-overdue _moving in and getting on with the star-crossed soulmate you searched the globe and fought a war and went on the run for, Rogers, Jesus Christ_, and okay. Maybe there were signs of something more. Something that was maybe everything, really, but he got there in the end. He got _here_ in the end. And that’s what counts.

“About goddamn time.”

Steve doesn’t even _want_ to put up a token protest when Sam slaps the table between them enthusiastically, celebrating Steve’s apparently-overdue _moving in and getting on with the star-crossed soulmate you searched the globe and fought a war and went on the run for, Rogers, Jesus Christ_, and okay. Maybe there were signs of something more. Something that was maybe everything, really, but he got there in the end. He got _here_ in the end. And that’s what counts.

And really, all Steve really wants to do right now is grin into his coffee as he remembers different coffee from earlier that morning at home, and how it had tasted on Bucky’s tongue.

Steve doesn’t hide, or even aim to tame that smile as he turns the conversation elsewhere, though; he’s not sure he could if he tried.

“How’s it going,” Steve asks, gesturing vaguely in a circle. “You know,” he takes a bite of the vanilla-cranberry muffin Sam had made him buy that he’s really glad he got because _damn_ is it good, but Sam’s looking at him strangely, and Steve wonders if maybe the vague-circle didn’t telegraph ‘shield’ like he’d intended. He frowns a little, and starts to feel like maybe he’s been shitty friend, given that they’ve only talked about all this a few times since Sam’s really got himself settled in his new role; Steve may have left voicemails, but he didn’t follow them up when he didn’t hear back, didn’t call again to make sure everything was okay. But to be fair, the Avengers have been out on middling missions only a handful of times with Sam at the helm, the world being fairly tame with its evildoings in the wake of near-extinction; but Steve swallows, his smile turning apologetic just in case as he moves to mime Sam’s wings and make it clear between swallowing his muffin and washing it down with a swig of coffee: “with the—”

“Are you angry that I don’t go by the name?”

Steve’s eyes widen, and he nearly drops his damn mug; he wasn’t expecting that in a million years. Sam opted to keep the Falcon mantle while he carried the shield and wore the colors, and frankly Steve had thought it was fitting, had been proud of Sam for asserting his own identity just as Steve had hoped. 

And from there he’d thought very little about names, and mostly just about Sam and the rest of the team staying safe.

“What?” Steve asks, unable to hide just how dumbfounded he is by the question. “Of course not.” Then Steve's eyes narrow. 

“Were you,” he frowns, wondering if there’s a bigger reason that his voicemails haven’t been returned; “have you been avoiding me because of _that_?”

Sam usually has a decent poker face, but it’s gone to shit just now, because his eyes grow wide and he looks caught out as bad as a kid in the fucking cookie jar.

“It’s not just, I mean, I wasn’t—”

_It’s not just_ betrays the bigger issue at play, and Steve understands, but it still rankles. Another man, another “him” gave Sam the shield, and Sam was shaken, still is by the incongruency of someone who actually _looked_ as ancient as Steve _is_ handing off the mantle to him, not just the fact that that person’s presence still can’t be explained but also the fact that the Steve here and _now_, in front of him, isn’t the one who gave him the shield in the first place. Isn’t the one who gave _up_ the shield at all, and maybe never would have.

Except Steve had in fact known how much the shield weighed on him—_god_, had he known—but what he didn’t realize was how much relief, and how little regret would come from walking away, from grabbing something else, something precious and impossible and bright, and clutching it tight with both hands, with some strange entangling of rampant need and all-encompassing reverence. Steve would have expected to want, at least sometimes, to have hands in the fight more than he does, and maybe the time will come when that changes, but now? Now, he’s something he never thought he’d be.

He’s content. And goddamnit: he’s happy. So _happy_, it sings in his bones.

But Sam still doesn’t seem to believe that the shield is his, even if Steve, here and now, has been pretty obvious about just how grateful as _fuck_ he is for how it all turned out, on that front at least.

Apparently, not obvious enough.

“I mean, it felt wrong to call myself that,” which at least doesn’t sound like the first few rounds of _are you sure you don’t want it back, I mean, this time travel shit’s fucked up, and I get it, you couldn’t fight like you used to, or else, that you, but you you—_

They’d run through that script for nearly a month after Sam had taken the shield in the first place.

“It’s just,” Sam fumbles a bit; “I don’t fit it, or it doesn’t fit me or maybe it took me so long to finally feel at home in calling myself a fancy superhero name at all, but then it seemed disrespectful, almost, to take yours because you’re here and still you even if you gave up the shield, but you gave _me_ the shield so then it felt disrespectful _not_ to and—”

“Sam.”

Steve raises a brow at him, but his smile stays soft. “If you want, I can count out how many street vendors I passed on the way here trying to sell me a hot new Falcon shirt, or hat, or in one case a very tasteful,” Steve chews the inside of his cheek until he remembers the term for the flouncy, strappy lingerie he’d almost bought to bring Sam as a gift: “_torsolette_, I think they called it?” Sam’s embarrassment is visible, and Steve laughs just a little.

“You’re the best anyone could ask for,” Steve sobers just a little, and tries to make sure his gaze imparts all the genuine certitude he feels when he says: “And you do a hell of a better job than I ever did,” because Sam’s the better man, and that’s the goddamn truth of it.

“Bullshit—” Sam tries to fight it but Steve brushes him off with a wave of his hand, changing conversational course immediately to make sure Sam doesn’t take that stream of nonsense any further.

“Tell me more about how often Carol Danvers seems to be dropping through the atmosphere?” Steve says with a suggestive quirk of his brow as he grins around a bite of his muffin—Sam had definitely made eyes at her a time or two, though they’d been largely unreciprocated. Worth needling Sam over at least a little. “Something I should know?”

“Yeah, probably,” Sam snorts, leaning back and crossing his arms with a knowing smirk. “Given that she’s dropping in to New _Asgard_ when she does.” And while that fact could have once been explained away with the original intention of Danvers finding the Asgardians a new planet? Steve happens to have received a very enthusiastic mass-shared video of Val installing a new town sign, complete with landscaping, followed by photos of her grinning over a laptop screen with the new tourism website displayed and a fan of location brochures propped on the keyboard. So the alternative would be that these visits may well be of a more _personal_ nature, and given the way Sam’s eyes dance?

That’s exactly what he means.

“Oh _wow_,” Steve says, though he shouldn’t all that surprised. Elite cosmic alien warrior and intergalactic pseudo-celestial battle guardian?

Shared life experience, then. Steve definitely gets that.

“Right?” Sam says, his grin turning a little wistful, and that makes Steve curious more than anything else, so he lifts a brow again and stares Sam down until he chuckles.

“Don’t think I can’t see how you’re dodging the point about you and Barnes,” Sam’s expression shifts, almost chiding. “But the whole fluorescent glow thing you’ve got going on,” he gestures at Steve’s person on the whole and Steve can feel himself flush, but he can’t hold back the way his lips twitch upward when his heart stumbles bouyantly, just a little; “tells me what I need to know about the important parts.” Sam smiles in return but warns playfully, if honestly: “You’re still not getting out of that conversation.”

Steve nods; sure. Later. 

_Now_, however—

“But I’ll bite, because,” and Sam’s expression goes back to wistful, and then a little bit giddy as he confesses: “there is a girl.”

“A girl?” Steve prompts, nudges at the shy edges of Sam’s tone.

“A _woman_,” Sam corrects; “she’s ex-Air Force, been consulting with us, and I’m thinking about asking her to join the team, provisionally at least, but…”

“You want to ask her out first?” Steve guesses, and Sam ducks his head just a tad.

“Better to do it before I offer her a superhero job, or after?” Sam asks, a little helplessly.

“Ouch,” Steve winces in sympathy; that’s a tough call.

“I know,” Sam groans. Though then his eyes get a little bit dreamy again, and Steve swallows back a sigh because that means he’s gonna probably ask her out first; “but she’s...” he trails off.

“Tell me about her,” Steve prompts when Sam seems to get lost in undoubtedly saccharine thoughts—it’s a state Steve finds himself in more than he’d ever imagined, these days, so he recognizes the general aura. “Then maybe we can figure out the particulars of getting your ass a date.”

Sam grins at him gratefully, and it’s been a long time, but Steve finally feels like he’s looking at his _friend_ again; not his successor or his comrade in arms—_former_ comrade—but his friend.

He didn’t realize how much he’d missed it, and so he takes in Sam’s words when he starts waxing poetic as the gift that they are:

“Her name’s Monica…”


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And Steve thinks, not for the first time that, like this, with Bucky, he could die happy someday.

The scent of coffee precedes him, but Steve knows the sound of Bucky’s footsteps coming closer long before even that.

“Whatcha up to?” Bucky murmurs with a kiss to Steve’s temple, natural as anything, as he places a mug in front of Steve on the desk. Steve sets down his tools—mostly charcoal, this morning—and turns to catch Bucky’s lips properly and Bucky leans down into him, Steve cupping his face to steady him and draw him in as they kiss slow and languid, warm in the morning sun where it streams in.

“Promised Pepper a series,” Steve mouths against Bucky’s lips before he turns, breaks away to show Bucky the barely-started piece he’s got on the table. “Charity auction coming up for the Relief Foundation.”

“You signing your name to them?” Steve knows the question is mostly about the money it’ll bring in versus Steve’s self-conscious need for anonymity, as Bucky rests his chin on Steve’s shoulder and studies the soft lines blended out, only vaguely forming the shapes that make up the whole of the series: a study of something dear to him, something he cherishes in his bones and that makes it harder, the decision whether to sign off on something so personal, but make so much more money for the reconstruction efforts, and of course he’d supplement the difference out of his own pocket because god knows he’s got plenty to spare—but that said, it’s not his decision. Not his alone, at least.

“I,” Steve starts, then sighs. “Help me decide?”

It’s not the best way to broach the subject, when Steve should be asking for permission, and maybe even forgiveness for how bold he’s been to even choose the subject matter in the first place, but Bucky presses his mouth to the juncture of Steve’s shoulder and waits there patiently, like the question’s not a question, but a given.

Steve breathes out slow as he reaches for the portfolio at the desk corner and flips it open, carefully extracting the pieces so as not to damage the delicate shading, the carefully rendered images so vulnerable in the open, for eyes to see.

Bucky’s quiet—not the normal kind of quiet, either, but the kind where he’s still and barely breathes—as Steve arranges a selection of the sketches for viewing, his heart in his throat as he pulls each piece out from hiding: taming down hair, wrapped at a wrist, kneading bread dough, tracing skin, biting a nail, working with wood like he’d learned in Wakanda—it’s hands. It’s an anatomical study of hands, and yet.

And _yet_, it’s Steve’s whole self splayed open as the care in each stroke, the _devotion_ bleeding from each mark that portrays Bucky’s strong, broad, beautiful hands gives away an open secret: that Steve would worship James Buchanan Barnes, body and soul, to the end of the universe and back.

When Bucky finally breathes, Steve doesn’t hear it. What he hears instead is a whisper too soft to gauge a tone, approving or otherwise:

“At least you got my good side, yeah?”

And Steve breaks a little to hear it, to know it’s the first thing Bucky thinks of, still. Steve’s hand darts behind him and grabs Bucky’s without thinking; brings Bucky’s knuckles straight to his lips where he breathes:

“I,” he starts, and clears his throat before hiding his face a little in the breath of Bucky’s palm in his grasp. “Not quite.”

Steve presses a kiss to the crease that bisects that palm before he guides Bucky’s hand to rest on Steve’s neck, because the touch will ground him, give him courage. Because he didn’t capture Bucky’s good side, not just because _all_ possible sides of him are more than just fucking _good_, but because there’s a reason Steve needs Bucky’s help to decide.

He reaches for the portfolio again and gently lays tissue sheets atop each drawing, keeping them safe before they’re set. His hand is almost steady when he grabs for the other half of the series, because while Steve knows the shape of Bucky head to toe like he knows the letters of his name, the world could only guess if they studied what’s in front of them in the pieces he’s shared so far. The rest of the images, though…

“Steve,” Bucky whispers, and reaches his fingers to hover over each rendering of his left hand, not daring to touch—the joins and the plates and the gleaming threads of gold, the articulation Shuri had designed for him that let him feel, that let him move with even more grace to the point where it _ached_ sometimes to watch him, so elegant and stunning, and Steve is pretty sure that breathless, perfect want is in these works more than the others: those vibranium fingers holding a strawberry up to his full lips; kneading nameless skin when he massages Steve’s shoulders; dancing across the screen of his phone; filling the bird feeder with a fearless chickadee seemingly waiting for its meal perched just inches away; connecting the dots of Steve’s freckles playfully down his arm; laced with Steve’s fingers, the meaning in it anything but casual. Nothing less than necessary.

Even if Steve wanted to keep the pieces unsigned, to include them _all_ meant their subject was undeniable. 

“Steve, these,” and Bucky’s voice is low, rough, maybe even choked and Steve fights a flinch at that sound for all that he’s learned to hate it because it almost always meant the worst; he fights because there’s something new underneath that’s stronger and fiercer, that’s warm in Steve’s chest and just a little tight along his thighs, and Bucky’s hand is still pressed against his skin, fingers close and firm just under the collar of his shirt. 

“These aren’t very subtle.”

“Didn’t mean for them to be,” Steve says, and he doesn’t intend for it to come out in a whisper. He does intend for it to come out as honest, though, because Steve’s always been better at drawing the things he feels deepest, cares for most.

“It’ll be pretty obvious who drew them, signed or not,” Bucky says, and his fingertips press just a little tighter, tenser. Steve forces himself to stay still, refuses to push either way when he asks:

“Does that bother you?”

Bucky exhales long, and there’s no pitch to it to give Steve a clue of what he’s thinking, where he’s leaning. 

“Same question, punk.”

Steve turns, but holds Bucky’s hand to stay on him, doesn’t want it to leave just as much as he cannot let the next words come without looking Bucky in the eyes and letting him read everything Steve knows his own gaze holds.

“Not one bit,” Steve says, and squeezes Bucky’s hand under his own, just a little. “I,” he swallows hard. The next things are caught in his throat and he needs them to have as much heart in them as they can, because he means them more than he’ll ever be able to just _say_.

“I never thought I was lucky, even with the serum,” Steve stumbles into it awkwardly, but once he’s started? Like hell he’s going to stop. “Kept almost dying for so long, almost getting lost that way, and when I’d finally found my feet, breathed clear and saw straight for once, then I got to losing instead, losing all the things that mattered the most, that I couldn’t,” he fits his fingers in between Bucky’s and curls them around to hold: “_wouldn’t_ live without,” and Steve closes his eyes around the part that had been longest in the learning, the part that he’d wasted so much time pretending around:

“And in all that losing, I got lost too. So it was worse.”

Bucky untangles his hand form Steve’s and cups Steve’s face, drawing him in for a kiss Steve didn’t realize he needed so desperately until he gasps into it, and the way Bucky’s tongue explores his mouth is no longer new but somehow it’s life-giving, full of promise every time but growing worn-in and comfortable, now. Soft and soothing and so much like home.

Steve only breaks apart far enough to speak, and to meet Bucky’s eyes when he does.

“But I look at you,” Steve breathes, and it’s warm between them, as close as they are; “I wake up next to you, and I can reach out and you’re there and I don’t know how in the hell I got lucky all of a sudden, but you’re there,” and it’s strange, because Steve’s voice grows thick with feeling even as it’s threatening to break:

“You’re there and I never imagined, I never _dreamed_,” Steve shakes his head and closes his eyes and almost goddamn pleads: “Buck—”

“They’re beautiful.”

And the hands he’d drawn and lavished attention and adoration upon, on paper, are smoothing up Steve’s face, tracing his cheekbones, lilting over his lashes like an exhalation until Steve’s ready to open his eyes, and when he does Bucky’s waiting, and he’s smiling so soft but sure, and when he murmurs “You’re beautiful,” Steve thinks not for the first time that, like this, with Bucky, he could die happy someday.

Steve’s hands cover Bucky’s in a second and their lips are greedier now, more urgent, and the feel of the bare skin of Bucky’s back beneath Steve’s hands is sun-warmed and decadent and that’s why he only gave the world Bucky’s hands, because the rest of Bucky is for Steve, like this, together in the middle of nowhere to hoard and revel in, but still: Steve’s proud as hell to call Bucky his, to hold Bucky close, to have a man like him to make a life with. Steve’s proud of Bucky, head to toes, heart and soul.

But the thing Steve treasures most, his _real_ point of pride, is that somehow, beyond all odds or reason, Bucky chose _him_, to call and hold and build a future with, just the same.


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “On the,” Bucky exhales, heavy and desperate and brutal, eyes wild, and the speechless, marrow-deep horror at the edges of his blown pupils—the only devastating thing Steve can see around the pitch black; that shining frenzied terror is all the confirmation Steve needs to know where Bucky’s mind had taken him: the helicarrier: Steve’s somehow-pleading resignation, blood in his mouth and Bucky’s eyes so _wide_—
> 
> “When you, I didn’t make you,” Bucky’s not subtle about measuring Steve’s breaths even as he can’t control his own, but Steve focuses his own attention on simply maintaining as close to full-body contact with Bucky as he can as he both holds him and tries to ground him by rubbing circles into the tension of his muscles; Bucky’s not subtle about running hands, so clumsy with the ghosts of his nightmare, through Steve’s hair, leaning into the crown of Steve’s head and pressing open lips to his scalp, still gasping but Steve presses into Bucky’s neck and kisses full and soft and steeped in feeling at the line of that throat before he whispers against the swell of Bucky’s pulse pressing still-too-fast against the bridge of his nose. 
> 
> “No,” Steve assures him, steadfast and certain: 
> 
> “You saved me.”

Steve’s wrapped up in Bucky’s arms that night, bare skin pressed against Steve, shoulders to hips, so he feels it start to happen, start to slip into the real world from inside Bucky’s head with the heaving of lungs against the line of his spine, the clenching of fingers against the plane of Steve’s chest. If he listens, or presses back into those gasping lungs hard enough, the pounding of Bucky’s pulse is thunderous; twists in Steve’s own chest painfully just to feel, just to hear. He’s careful to maintain contact when he slowly turns in Bucky’s hold, knowing that when Bucky jolts awake he'll need it, as soon as Steve’s lips are at his jaw and words at his ear—_Buck, come on, just a dream, just a bad dream, come back now, wake up, it’s okay, I’m here, I’m here_—manage to calm him just that _little_ bit sooner, with just that little bit less damage, that little bit less agony. Anything really, and god, but Steve’s grateful that for all Bucky’s been through, the nights plagued by these dreams are relatively few, now—but when they come, for all that Steve will give his whole heart to learning as much as he can about each and every horrorscape that visits Bucky’s mind so as to help ease him through it as best he can, Steve won’t ever stop aching for the fact of them, for all that they carry along as baggage, for the depth of the shadows under Bucky’s haunted eyes they bring with them.

Soon, Bucky tenses head to toe, the sudden and complete stillness an instinct that speaks to where Bucky’s nightmare had taken him: a time when showing the weakness of feeling was damn near a death sentence, and Steve bites back a moan because it doesn’t happen as often as Steve knows it did still in Wakanda, even, but the fact that it has to happen at all hurts, makes Steve all the more dedicated here and now to doing whatever he can to care for Bucky through the torment, and see him through the other side.

“Easy,” Steve murmurs low, palms braced on Bucky’s cheeks, damp skin beneath his touch and Steve can’t tell if it’s sweat or tears, but both seize in his chest something terrible. “Shhh, easy now,” he tries to talk Bucky down gently, even though he knows from experience it likely won’t do any good but he can’t help it, he needs to reach out and try: try to soothe and calm those eyes when they meet his, calm that heartbeat Steve can feel against his fingertips, the torrent driving an ungodly pressure at Bucky’s jaw: he has to _try_.

“I didn’t, I,” Bucky rasps, pawing at Steve's chest, running shaky hands over Steve’s arms, up to tremble along the lines of his face as he swallows hard over, and over, and over until he can more than mouth around words, and Steve’s pretty sure he knows this particular nightmare by now; expects the next words when they come:

“On the,” Bucky exhales, heavy and desperate and brutal, eyes wild, and the speechless, marrow-deep horror at the edges of his blown pupils—the only devastating thing Steve can see around the pitch black; that shining frenzied terror is all the confirmation Steve needs to know where Bucky’s mind had taken him: the helicarrier, Steve’s somehow-pleading resignation from the floor, blood in his mouth and Bucky’s eyes so _wide_—

“When you, when,” his voice cracks; “I didn’t make you,” and Bucky might not be able to get the words out, but he’s certainly not subtle about measuring Steve’s breaths even as he can’t control his own, and Steve focuses his attention on simply maintaining as close to full-body contact with Bucky as he can, as he both holds him and tries to ground him by rubbing circles into the tension of his muscles; Bucky’s not subtle about running hands, so clumsy with the ghosts of nightmare—waterlogged and blood-soaked and not _breathing_, Steve knows that part of this dream and how it cuts like a knife through Bucky’s chest every time—Bucky’s not subtle about threading shaking fingers through Steve’s hair, leaning into the crown of Steve’s head and pressing open lips to his scalp, still gasping, but Steve presses into Bucky’s neck and kisses full and soft and steeped in feeling at the line of that throat before he whispers against the swell of Bucky’s pulse pressing still-too-fast against the bridge of Steve's nose:

“No,” Steve assures him, steadfast and certain—Bucky is rarely rendered vulnerable like this, and Steve guards every inch of him with his life; “metal gave out.” Because Bucky’s hands that day didn’t abandon him to the river, no;

“You saved me.”

He reaches for Bucky’s hands and stills them in between both of his own, kisses his fingertips and eases them both to lie facing one another, legs tangled as Bucky’s breath begins to slow but his eyes don’t lose their terror as he pulls his hands from Steve’s touch and traces Steve’s body almost prayerfully; this, too, Steve knows.

“Here,” Bucky’s touch ghosts, like he can barely stand to make contact, and then presses full and firm with a hiss of breath to Steve’s flank, where there’s no sign of a bullet having ripped through flesh save for in the hearts and minds of the two of them, flayed wide as they are when this nightmare rears its head.

“And here,” Bucky pants, a sob in his tone, in the stutter of his still-heaving chest that’s ripped out and bleeding as he stares mournfully at the space near Steve’s collarbone where the knife had penetrated, that’s long since healed to perfection, that Steve reaches toward so as to cover Bucky’s hand there in confirmation, which Steve’s learned he needs for this, in this, but also with as much comfort as he can manage to convey.

“And here,” Bucky moves his left palm, doesn’t look away from Steve’s clavicle as he finds precisely where the bullet had hit his thigh and grabs there almost like he needs to feel out his penance, save that they both know, had talked it through long before they knew what they could be to one another, what they could have for all that they felt, and Bucky knows as best he can, and Steve will give as long as he needs to remind him and to press it deeper into Bucky’s skin deep enough to reach his soul: they both _know_, but like this, when the images and the memories and the horrors are burned into the present where they don’t belong, by a wayward subconscious wheeling free—here, Steve only cradles him, holds him dear and keeps him warm and supports the need in him to ground this moment in the pain of what once was, the unspeakable things he’d suffered where they stood eked out on them both.

Bucky’s trembling strengthens, his breath still uneven but harder, just shy of wheezing for too little oxygen and far too much strain: he presses the full breadth of his palm against Steve’s stomach, and his voice cracks when he testifies: “Here,” and Steve lets him hold there until he starts to breathe if not normally, then at least a little less frantic and then he reaches too, and tests to see if Bucky will let him slide their hands together; waits until it works and then lifts Bucky’s wrist swift to his mouth and presses lips there, hard and sure. 

“And,” Bucky breathes, like that’s all he can give and that’s enough, that’s perfect because Steve will never take for granted all the times he lived where he thought that breath was gone for good, and what a miracle it is that it still exists at all, sweet in Steve’s chest right against his heart, always—it’s enough, and Steve watches as Bucky’s hand reaches out, fingers shaking for it on top of the still-present tremors of emotion as he strokes over a fine-if-lengthy line of white, thin and catching a sheen in the light where it stretches down Steve’s skin.

“And here,” his voice is so choked, so goddamn heartbreaking and Steve’s glad that Bucky’s touch is where it is, because this is the end of the ritual, the ordeal of the aftermath; this is where Steve can cover Bucky’s hand with his own and hold it still against his skin and promise him:

“No. Not there.” 

No, because there’s still that whisper of a scar there: older, before things healed too fast and too complete to leave any mark the eye could speak to. 

“Andy McMaster,” Steve murmurs, the old dingy lot down the road from their building a foggy memory even in his mind. “We were just kids.” 

And Steve leans in to press a hard, swift kiss to Bucky’s lips as he lifts his face and looks just a little bit confusedly at Steve as the haze of the dream starts to finally release its hold. 

Bucky pauses, and frowns at Steve’s skin, his hand against Steve’s skin, furrow between his brows as his breathing starts to steady, and Steve starts to steady with it.

“A,” Bucky says slowly, every letter molasses-thick. He meets Steve’s eye as he blinks, the color in his slowly inching back. 

“A turtle.” The words, absurd as they seem, aren’t a question. It’s a close thing, but they’re mostly sure. Steve smiles wider than it warrants, but he’s so relieved Bucky’s coming down, coming back from all that dark.

“A turtle.” That little bastard Andy had been throwing ever-bigger rocks at the poor thing’s shell and Steve maybe took a decent sized one to his middle, unexpectedly sharp and slicing through his already-threadbare shirt, drawing blood and bruising something awful. 

Bucky shudders, and bows his head under Steve’s chin, and Steve clutches him tight and guides him in close, but Bucky has his own trajectory, sliding down Steve’s waiting body and tucking his head at the center of Steve’s chest, going boneless and heavy against the rise and fall of Steve’s breath.

“Buck?”

And he’s silent, and so still, and Steve’s nervous for it as the seconds drag on until Bucky shivers through a deep sigh and presses closer into Steve as he breathes:

“Some things don’t change,” and it’s like the world settles around them with the sweet relief in those words that Steve doesn’t quite understand, and Bucky just stays, his cheek held tight enough against Steve’s ribs that Steve can feel his own heartbeat as a phantom echo where it strikes against Bucky’s skin and—

“This,” and oh. “Just here.” And _oh_, but Bucky’s voice is something to drown in, so wrung out but bare for it, unfiltered and unfettered and a goddamn gift, and Bucky nuzzles a little into Steve, back and forth with the same give-and-take of Steve’s pulse and that. That’s his, he _wants_; he needs this primal proof, of _Steve_—

“Doesn’t matter what the world does, not when or how,” Bucky kisses Steve’s chest then, and Steve’s heart kicks up into that depthless affection, welcome and willing and wanting for always.

“Whatever it throws at me, at us,” and it’s not a new idea, a new sentiment for them, but in this raw space between them now there’s something soul-searing and tender and tremblingly true in those two letters, so simple, just _us_: Steve’s weak with it, and he wraps arms tighter around Bucky’s shoulders, and exhales shaky against Bucky’s hair.

“No matter what, this still makes sense of it,” he mouths wet and warm and slow and needy, making himself seem small against Steve’s beating heart and oh, but Steve feels himself break a little, and feels Bucky’s whole entire _being_ seep into the cracks left behind and it’s immaculate. 

“This makes everything right.” Bucky inhales sharply, but goes boneless against Steve, heavy on the exhale. “_This_ means everything is _right_.”

“Buck,” Steve’s voice is strangled, is balanced on the head of a pin and stretched to the breaking, and all he can do is clutch at Bucky like he’s not already poised to fuse as one into Steve’s blood and bones in this moment, in all the moments to come.

“Just let me,” Bucky exhales, and somehow it almost feels like it’s less meant to ask for Bucky’s sake, and more meant to settle Steve beneath him, to hold them both in this moment to draw comfort and seek solace, seek shelter.

“Just here.”

And Bucky gropes blindly for a second before he finds Steve's hand, before he laces their fingers and holds, squeezes slow but strong and Steve feels something roll over him, and some weight lift off of him, and Steve’s eyes slide closed as he exhales and lets himself feel out the press of their bodies and Steve lets the heart Bucky holds to so tightly crack open wide like maybe Bucky can hear it, can feel it.

Can know somehow deeper that it’s his beyond question; without reservation or relent.

________________

Steve would recognize those eyes anywhere. From any place, in any time. Even if he didn’t know from experience that time and space would make no difference, he’d be sure of it anyway. It’d still be true.

Just now, he keenly feels said eyes on his back as stands by the stove, and he clenches his jaw just a little petulantly as he stirs, and stirs, and keeps going out of sheer stubbornness for a good five minutes before he finally stops—the batter is already mixed; overmixed? Can you overmix scones? Like, the batter for scones? You can’t mix _scones_—well, you _could_ mix scones but they’d get crumbly and that would be a stupid thing to do, and fuck but he’s overtinking all this, isn’t he? Of course he is, but he’s on edge, and he does know that some things can be overmixed; and he’s not hopeless with simple stuff, he really isn’t, despite popular opinion to the contrary. But he’d never had reason to _bake_ like this in the 30s, for both practicality and lack of resources, and he never had much of a reason in the 21st century either, for the sake of JARVIS and FRIDAY and delivery, which was both amazing and a very easy way to relatively-apathetically meet his absurd caloric needs when he still wasn’t sure what the 21st century was for, at least not for _him_—but that’s neither here nor there, nor _now_, and it’s really only now that he sees that time, just out of the ice, in such jaw-dropping contrast that it almost frightens him, but then makes him so warm and grateful he can’t bring himself to care. 

But the point is: cooking. It’s just—following directions when he _wants_ to is something he’s pretty good at, sort of, or else he can be, he _does_ know how to follow orders, because he was Captain America but he used to answer to people, a little, to the point that there were consequences when he ultimately ignored them, but still, he _can_ follow instructions when he wants to, but good god_damn_ if this culinary fuckery isn’t more than just the recipe card, or else, the recipe-website on the tablet propped against the backsplash, and all he wants is just to make something that’s not flat and maybe a little on the burnt side at the bottoms but then infuriatingly half-done near the top and it should not be this _hard_ and—

And okay, fine. Bucky’s eyes on him are unwavering, if the heat Steve’s feeling spread across his chest and rise swiftly upward in a flush across his neck is anything to go by. And maybe he’s mixing too hard because it’s a good distraction for his hands when what they want is to spin and grab Bucky by the hips and back him into the corner so he can slide onto the countertop just like Bucky’d done to Steve last night, and Steve would do just that if the oven weren’t preheated, and if he weren’t trying to prove a point. 

Not-contrary to popular opinion: Steve Rogers really does have a hard time backing down from a challenge. 

He sighs, and finally puts the bowl down and spins around to face Bucky, who’s leaning casually against the doorframe behind Steve and breaking off pieces of a fancy bar of chocolate in his hand: dark, because he likes how rich it is. He never had a favorite chocolate when they were young, too glad to have any kind, but now, he savors it and smiles around it when he gets a taste and Steve doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of watching Bucky enjoy simple things so freely. It’s an intoxicating sight.

But then, that might be partially just because it’s Bucky.

But Bucky’s swallowing, and Steve follows the motion a little hungrily before he shakes himself and frowns, crossing his arms over his chest because Bucky’s eyes are still on him, glittering, and Steve knows that look. Knew it already from how it felt, but seeing it straight on: Bucky’s a good liar, can hide everything he feels when he wants to.

Steve’s lucky that Bucky doesn’t want to anymore, not with him. And it’s really fucking obvious Bucky has an opinion about Steve’s baking.

“What?” Steve bites out, just a little; and Bucky’s lips quirk upward just a little at the tone.

“Nothing.”

Steve scowls. “Bullshit.”

Bucky breaks off another piece of chocolate and pops it into his mouth.

“Come _on_,” Steve doesn’t whine, absolutely does not whine: “_spill_.”

Bucky lets his grin spread full, now, untampered: the fucker. He’s lucky he’s a beautiful son of a bitch, one that Steve would give his life for a hundred times over.

“You’ll figure it out.” 

The sound Steve makes is somewhere between a sigh and a growl. No, he’s not especially proud of it.

“I’ll figure it out, like,” Steve grinds the question out, like stripping away his pride and _asking_ is painful, but he’s starting to feel a little desperate about his possibly-over-stirred scones; “like a lightbulb moment when I fix it right in the nick of time?” 

Bucky just blinks at him.

“Or ‘figure it out’ when it all goes wrong and it tastes like shit because I used salt instead of sugar?”

Bucky purses his lips and saunters over, drumming fingers idly on the countertop.

“We definitely don’t have that much salt, so you’re safe on that front.”

Steve groans.

“You’re going to let me poison our dear friend,” Steve tries a new tactic; “who I remind you is also a national icon,” because maybe Bucky will be more forthcoming if it’s for someone’s _wellbeing_—“_and_ his new girlfriend for what? Your _amusement_?”

Bucky snorts, and Steve’s shoulders slump because damnit. Pity-by-proxy was his best bet.

“I am, in fact, deeply invested in _not_ poisoning either our dear friend or his girlfriend,” Bucky says, lifting up to sit on the counter, and Steve’s not naive enough to believe that Bucky didn’t read Steve’s distraction in his eyes, or his body, or his goddamn breathing pattern, fuck only knew, but _Bucky_ certainly knows exactly what he’s doing when he slowly lets his thighs spread open, just a little too much to be accidental, and Steve resolutely doesn’t look between them. Bucky rubs his hands across the denim of his jeans and Steve swallows a little harder than is comfortable.

Bucky leans forward and braces palms on his knees, stretching deliciously and Steve’s going to throw the batter on him in frustration, or jump him and probably knock the batter on the floor in the process, and if it’s bad batter then what does it matter, he’s not entirely sure what’s stopping him—

Except Bucky’s hand's reaching out for his cheek, and Steve didn’t know he’d gravitated that close to him until the touch registers and he leans into it before he can think, not that thinking would stop him, and Bucky’s smile softens a little, and goes warm all around the edges. 

“That’s why you’re practicing,” Bucky reminds him, because fine, yes, that’s true; and Bucky’s ankles are suddenly nudging Steve closer from behind his knees and then higher, even as he leans back on the heels of his palms. 

“And you will continue practicing until I’m satisfied that you can manage to deliver on your inability to _not_ be such a stubborn little shit that you let Sam fucking Wilson goad you into specifying that the home-cooked meal you promised him had to actually be cooked by _you_.”

Which, yeah. Yeah. That is what landed him here. Twice the challenge, both Sam’s and Bucky’s, to make good on baking dessert. He’s better—not _great_, but still much better—at cooking, and so he wanted to ace this first. In case it took him longer.

And he’s definitely proven that yes, it is, in fact, taking him longer. Never let it be said that Steve’s tactical mind wasn’t among the best of his generation, and then some.

So, it’s only logical and natural and _tactically sound_ of him to frame Bucky’s face and pull himself close enough for Bucky to wrap his legs around him long and full, and press his lips to Bucky’s and slide his tongue in on contact and goddamn devour him, licking a satisfied hum from his throat and sucking at the bittersweet tang of the chocolate he’d been eating like it’s the nectar of the damned gods.

Bucky’s arms are tangled around his neck, now, as he pulls back just enough to nip at Steve’s lower lip and draw out a moan that opens his mouth wide enough for Bucky to surge forward and bite hard enough to bruise but not to bleed, and then lave soft enough to soothe.

“You snuck the batter,” Bucky breathes between Steve’s lips, and Steve gasps a surprised laugh.

“Maybe.”

“And you didn’t die,” Bucky presses a smile more than a kiss against Steve’s lips.

“Asshole,” Steve hisses the breath of it between coaxing Bucky’s lips back open wide enough for him to drive the exchange, but Bucky’s still grinning, fingers dancing along Steve’s jaw enough to draw a shiver down Steve’s spine as he licks in slow; torturous.

“Cranberry,” he samples, draws the word out like syrup. “Orange.”

“Cocoa,” Steve murmurs back, stealing one last taste of rich chocolate from Bucky’s teeth before his neck is tipping back as Bucky starts to kiss at his chin, down the column of his throat before he stops, sucks achingly light but insistent just next to Steve’s pulse until the skin burns beautifully for it before he stops and breathes against the skin, cold, and whispers:

“You forgot the eggs.”


	9. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does he make your heart flutter?” Pepper asks mischievously. “Still?”
> 
> Bucky laughs brightly.
> 
> “Like a goddamn school girl.”
> 
> Steve feels himself flush; feels his smile threaten to break his face as his own heart flutters like it owns wings strong enough to break his ribs and damn well take flight.
> 
> “Does he treat you right?”
> 
> “Better than I deserve.”
> 
> Steve has to keep himself from making noise in protest: that’s not possible, and he’ll be damned if Bucky believes anything less.
> 
> “Is he good in bed?”

“Uncle Bucky,” Morgan gapes at the seemingly infinite ceilings once they’re subterranean, the full-wall observation window of the vibranium shuttles lighting up her reflection and making her wide eyes glint violet with every pass. Bucky grins and leans down to her height to stare right over her shoulder and kiss her cheek.

“Told you your birthday present was too big to fit in a box,” he says. They’d spent a quicker-than-normal journey to Wakanda—though still not as swift as Steve was used to, having taken a private Stark jet so as not to spoil the surprise—with Morgan asking questions and trying to needle details about her gift out of Bucky to little avail. He’d eventually told her not to worry about it, that she was going to spend the weekend living like a princess, at which they’d both had the opportunity to hide their laughter as Morgan’s face fell and she lamented how _boring_ princesses were because they just wore dresses and went to silly parties and waved at people and didn’t get to have any fun and weren’t even allowed to do _experiments_, which Uncle Bruce had tried easing her into over the past few months and had failed miserably, because the daughter of Tony Stark wasn’t going to _ease_ into anything when it came to science.

Which was why Bucky had chosen this particular birthday present, and hadn’t bothered hiding it from Steve either when he’d been clear they’d _both_ be chaperoning Morgan to Wakanda for an extended weekend after her birthday proper—normally he’d have been cagey, like he used to be when he’d picked a bouquet of flowers for his ma made mostly of weeds to cheer her up, or scrounged money for a new sketchbook and wasn’t sure it was the good kind of paper, or even when Steve had spent his first birthday reunited with Bucky while he himself was on the run, and Bucky’d been wringing his fingers over whether Steve would like the easel he goddamn _made himself_: normally he’d have been nervous about his chosen gift and would’ve kept it mostly to himself, for pride and fear of failure, but not this time. This time, he just wanted it to be perfect, and watching Bucky shine with the excitement of it and ask Steve’s opinion with childlike giddiness had been a gift to Steve in the process that he had no reason to receive, but that he grasped and hoarded fiercely nonetheless.

“Bucky?” 

Morgan doesn’t turn when Bucky stands and smiles, walking over toward the voice that beckons him, so Steve steps in and watches the transit lines with Morgan, who’s still entranced, and finds himself lulled by their rhythm, and the beauty of the lights; he’s calm here, like he never used to think he’d ever be, but he’s beginning to think that’s more to do with his life, and the people in it, than with where he is in the world.

But Wakanda, though. There _is_ something about it.

“Shuri,” Steve watches in his peripherals as Bucky scoops her into a hug that she returns just as strong. “God, I’ve missed you.”

She kisses his cheek and smacks his shoulder all in the same motion as he pulls away.

“I have a few ideas on how we might fix that,” she says pointedly, which is as much agreement to missing _him_ as Steve thinks she’d ever say aloud. “But for later.” 

She walks toward the window, Bucky following just a few steps behind before she crouches in a way that makes it seem like she was too tall, not that Morgan is too small: it’s subtle, but it’s perfect as Morgan finally turns, looking at the woman now beside her.

“Are you Morgan?”

Morgan sizes her up for a few seconds before she nods.

“Well, that’s brilliant, because I am Shuri,” she starts, but Morgan’s quick enough between her pause to ask, brow furrowed:

“Shuri,” she says; skeptical. “Like the princess?” Because of course Morgan had heard of her, even if she doesn’t remember her from her father’s funeral. 

“That is me, indeed,” Shuri says with a wide smile; “and I happen to be taking a lovely young lady named Morgan on a tour of my lab today.”

Morgan blinks, and Steve can read on her face the difficulty she has computing _princess_ and _lab_ as coexisting simultaneously; he watches Bucky’s grin widen as he sees the very same.

“My daddy had a lab,” Morgan settles on saying, finally. “Mom lets me inside sometimes, as long as I don’t touch anything dangerous and F.R.I.D.A.Y. keeps an extra set of eyes on me.”

“I happen to know about your father’s lab,” Shuri says, her tone low and kind but not too careful, not like she has to walk on eggshells around the idea of the dead. “He was a brilliant man,” then her own eyes widen a little, her tone turning impressed: 

“And _you’re_ allowed in his workshops?” Shuri raises an eyebrow. “You must be quite the genius already,” and Morgan laughs brightly at the praise and damn; Shuri’s a natural at this.

“Would you like to go inside there, first?” Shuri asks, head tilting toward the magnetic railing Morgan had been transfixed by before her approach.

“Can we?” Morgan asks, only just holding back the full brunt of her excitement, and Shuri grins again, standing up straight and offering Morgan a hand that Morgan takes without question, but she does pause and turn toward Bucky before he moves forward.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Bucky asks, and damn, _he’s_ a natural, too, because it’s a question that’s meant to be answered honestly, has no worry or desire to hover in it. Morgan doesn’t answer right away, worrying her lip, and Bucky just smiles softly at her and leans down, rubbing her arms assuringly.

“How about I wait here, huh?” And she smiles, and leans to kiss his cheek, and breaks away from Shuri to hug Steve around the middle before she’s back at Shuri’s side waiting to be led on her adventure. 

“Have fun!” Bucky calls after them with a laugh before shoving his hands inside his pockets and turning toward Steve.

And Steve’s always admired how much Bucky _cared_, how thoughtful he could be, and how _good_ he is at the core of his being, and always has been; the reason countering Steve’s swift temper, the urge to protect over the want for revenge, the narrowed eyes but steady hands to heal and soothe Steve’s fire, and sometimes his rage. It’d always been a fucking privilege, whether Steve knew it as clearly as he should have or not, to call Bucky his closest friend, his brother, his lifeline, the north he oriented toward without thinking: a gravity all his own.

But whatever Bucky is now, to Steve: his heart, his life, his soul?

Whatever Bucky is now, maybe _everything_: Steve has never been more grateful than he is just then, watching Bucky’s gentle smile turning toward _Steve_; he’s never been more grateful to hold close the impossible human being that is Bucky Barnes.

“You okay there?” Bucky asks when Steve gets lost in that feeling and says nothing for too many moments.

“Yeah,” Steve answers, a little rough, and Bucky quirks a brow at him before he clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Bucky studies him for a few quiet seconds before he shakes his head slowly and takes Steve’s hand in his.

“C’mon.” And he leads them off not in the direction they came, but down a corridor Steve hadn’t even noticed, there were so fucking many to choose from. 

“We heading to your hut?” Steve asks, and he’s already got some amazing ideas about what they can do in that hut, ideas that Steve doesn’t know if he always had as idle fantasies, doesn’t know if he never entertained them consciously because being like this, having _this_ was something so far beyond his ability to envision that the question, the possibility never grabbed hold—Steve doesn’t know, though for the depth of his feelings now he suspects one of those is close to the truth; but it doesn’t really matter.

Because those ideas are ones he’s _really_ keen to act on now, and that’s what counts.

“Oh, Stevie,” Bucky says, and the tone is almost scolding, almost disappointed, though his eyes are dancing, sly and sure. “Morgan’s not the only one getting the royal treatment this weekend.”

And Steve’s ideas take a sharp detour toward all the things that could mean and more, and what they could _do_ with it, his imaginings growing more and more intricate and detailed with every step Bucky leads him to take, and Steve’s a little hazy on how long they walk because he really does have a vivid imagination that’s enjoying, more and more lately, the ability to get lost in beautiful possibilities rather than worst case scenarios, and so he’s surprised when they stop and he finds himself in a lavish hallway, in front of a door that looks both ancient and a thousand years beyond the here and now, all at once, with Bucky pressing his hand to a point in the wall that looks exactly like every other part of the wall, save that the door starts to disappear as his touch is registered, and then Bucky’s backing them both into a room, his mouth at Steve’s ear as the wall resolidifies and Bucky turns them abruptly to pin Steve against it.

“Shuri soundproofed the room, too,” he breathes, and Steve feels it shudder through his entire body, through his blood and bones, because oh.

The things he can _imagine_.

________________

They’re back in New York, with a newly-minted six-year-old who no longer thinks being a princess is such a woeful existence (_but Uncle Steve, there were never any stories about Shuri princesses!_; and Shuri’ll get a kick out of that, though Steve suspects she’s already _well_ aware she’s in a category all her own). Steve’s tucked Morgan in, though he knows she’ll call for Bucky to read a story soon enough; she’ll crawl out of bed and carefully weigh the appropriate book for the evening from her extensive library first, organized by genre then name then color. But it’s on his way down the stairs that he hears Pepper’s voice drift toward him from the living room.

“You can talk about it. It’s nice, actually,” her voice isn’t sad, exactly. It’s not happy, but it isn’t sad. “Reminds me of the good times,” he hears her huff not quite a laugh. “Some of the really awful times, too, but that’s nice, in a way.” And then there is a smile in her voice, clear and strong: 

“Keeps the memories _real_.”

He hears a long intake of breath that he knows is Bucky without seeing his chest rise, without him saying a word. Steve just knows.

“I feel like I’m,” and when Bucky does speak, his voice is soft, almost reverent. “I’ve never felt this way before and then,” he exhales slow, and Steve knows he shouldn’t stand and listen but he’s rooted to the spot: he’s not good enough of a man to make noise and announce his presence, but he also doesn’t have enough shame to pretend it’s an accident that he stays quiet and still on the stairs. 

“Then at the same time, it’s almost like I’ve always felt exactly like this and it’s just,” Bucky huffs a laugh in that way Steve adores, that he likes to feel beneath his lips when it creeps up Bucky’s throat and escapes his mouth. “Real, now. I can touch it, I can touch _him_—”

Pepper hums when Bucky’s voice cuts off, a warm sound, and Steve hears the clink of glass on glass: she’s pouring a glass from the bottle of Sauternes she’d asked Bucky and Steve if they liked well enough to share after they’d finished dinner.

“And everyone says you get used to it, that it dims down to a soft thing over time but, it’s been,” Bucky picks back up again: “It still feels like it’s new, and almost too bright to look at, but I’d blind myself every single moment of every single day just to have him. And because it’s _him_, it doesn’t hurt at all. It feels,” and Bucky stops, but it’s _Steve_ who feels this time, feels _all_ the time because Bucky’s making his chest hurt for how fast his blood is pumping, for how _right_ the sting of it sing where it’s coursing through his veins.

“Sorry,” Bucky murmurs, tone sheepish, but Pepper just laughs: tiny, but present.

“No,” she says, and Steve hears the swirl of liquid as she takes a sip of her wine. “I felt that way,” she tells him; “I’d worked for him for so long, you know, but it was never _just_ that, and when he, the first time,” she sighs, and Steve can’t pick apart all the emotions in that single sound.

“It felt so new and so simply routine, in the best sense, all at once.”

Bucky hums, and Steve can see in his mind’s eye the way they sprawl familiarly from opposite sides of the sofa, sometimes Bucky sitting up to rub Pepper’s feet—_because he used to_, and neither of them ever speak or stumble over the fact that Bucky knows it from casing them as a potential hit—and Pepper sighs, this time warm and soft as her voice turns low, a lilt of teasing to it:

“Does he make your heart flutter?” she asks mischievously. “Still?”

Bucky laughs brightly.

“Like a goddamn school girl.”

Steve feels himself flush; feels his smile threaten to break his face as his own heart flutters like it owns wings strong enough to break his ribs and damn well take flight.

“Does he treat you right?”

“Better than I deserve.”

Steve has to keep himself from making noise in protest: that’s not possible, and he’ll be damned if Bucky believes anything less.

“Is he good in bed?” Pepper asks coyly, and Steve doesn’t get to hear the answer because a voice calls out from behind him, floating down the stairs:

“Uncle _Bucky_!”

Bucky huffs out a laugh, and Pepper sighs disappointedly, but the teasing edge to the sound is undeniable.

“Storytime.” Because that’s what Morgan wants; Bucky’s got a gift for it, and Steve suspects it’s a combination of life experience, little sisters, all the pulps he read when they were kids, and the amount of time Steve himself spent in bed needing entertaining. “I’ll have to pull something out about the arm, after a weekend in a technological paradise.”

Steve hears the furniture shift with Bucky’s weight as he stands, as Steve softly descends the rest of the stairs into the kitchen, where he can at least make it _look_ like he was taking his time getting his own drink. Or something.

But then he hears Pepper speak before Bucky can leave the room.

“She loves you,” Pepper says plainly, but with deep affection, and Steve basks in the bashful smile that suffuses Bucky’s answer.

“I love her,” he pauses, and Steve hears footsteps and the light sound of a kiss on the cheek: “and you.”

“You’re a member of this family, you know that, right?”

That statement, as clear and full of honest feeling as the first—that statement brings quiet for a long stretch of moments before Bucky sighs, still without anything to say as he stumbles around words:

“I…”

“He forgave you,” Pepper tells him knowingly; she’s good at that. “I know that’s what makes you hesitate. But he did.”

Bucky’s still silent, but Steve can almost map out the doubt inside the silence itself. Steve’s certain Pepper can see it play behind his eyes. 

“And I’m not a liar, James, or else, not a good one,” she confesses; reminds him. “If he hadn’t said it, clear and plain, straight to me, I’d tell you something else that was true, like that I knew he _would_ have forgiven you, that he didn’t blame you, that it wasn’t ever really _about_ you at all, because _those_ things I know without him ever having to have said a thing.”

Bucky breathes in deep, and Pepper’s voice grows a little quieter, a little nostalgic but somehow all the more convincing for it, lost just a little in memories that were nothing less than true. 

“But he was reliving the old days, one night,” she says softly; “he didn’t do it often, said _these_ were the glory days, the ones that were just us, that were family,” her smile is audible, just a little brighter than her sorrow. “But he was lamenting how things had panned out after the Accords,” she cuts off there; there’s really no reason for any of them to say more than that, when it comes to what fractured their world before it shattered entirely.

“And he said,” Pepper picks back up, on the tail of a deep sigh. “He said he was a coward, to try and blame a weapon as if it could think like a man. And a hypocrite, because when the world had tried to make _him_ that man, it had eaten him alive.”

Bucky’s silence is still disbelieving, Steve knows, but it’s gotta be marvelling, too, because Steve’s a little dumbstruck that Tony would have said it that plain, would have admitted out loud but then again—

Then again, there was a lot of time that passed in which they’d both changed: Tony for the better, Steve thinks, and Steve himself for the worse. But Steve’s been working on turning that around; thinks he’s made a good go of it so far. Knows he has Bucky to thank for it, through and through.

“He forgave you,” Pepper reiterates, unwavering, and sounds thoughtful, a grin in her tone when she adds: “And if he were here? I think you’d have been great friends.”

Bucky’s inhale rings sharp.

“The hell makes you say that?”

“You love his family,” Pepper says simply; “and his family loves you.”

She’s smart enough of a woman that she leaves time for the simple, unshakeable way that she says it to sink in the way that it’s meant to, the way that it needs to. Bucky takes a little longer with such things than most people.

“And you’re nerdy about the same things,” she tacks on playfully, and Bucky snorts, and Steve hears him cross the room before he asks:

“More wine?”

“Ah,” Pepper hums as Bucky refills her glass: “the _real_ reason I love you, James Barnes.”

Bucky breathes out a chuckle, Steve tracing the sound of the bottle on the coffee table before he hides himself fully in the kitchen, smiling softly to himself as Bucky approaches the stairs and calls behind him:

“Don’t finish that before I get back.”


	10. X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s laying down the preliminary lines, and frankly he doesn’t have to look to know how they stretch and fall, because there’s no angle or pose Bucky could be in that Steve can’t picture in his mind with perfect clarity, be it for having seen it and committed it to memory or for the way he knows Bucky’s body better than he probably knows his own, because he cares about it deeper: either way, Steve knows what he’s drawing without studying his subject.
> 
> But studying his subject is one of his absolute favorite things in the world.

“Steve.”

He hears his name, and he processes it, but it’s distant. It’s foggy and outside of his already divided focus: only barely focused on the book in his hands, though that’s what he’s staring at. Mostly zeroed in on the television, and the too-loud, too-frantic stream of the news and he knows this, he complains about it often enough, the scaremongering and the hateful, overblown tone of the headlines and the soundbytes that are assaulting his consciousness and he can’t trust it, you can’t _trust_ it—

“_Steve_,” and Bucky’s voice is closer, now, and Steve didn’t realize he’d gotten to his feet, standing in front of the screen.

“You’re killing me, here,” Bucky grouses, just a little. “Does it even help, like this?” He reaches his hand around Steve’s body to gesture at the action unfolding: the War Machine suit dancing in between Sam’s now blue-accented Falcon gear. Monica—Photon (_if you’re nasty_ Bucky would add with a laugh, because Monica had introduced herself just like that with a wink and Bucky had decided he loved her immediately)—bounded around with acrobatic finesse. Parker is agile as ever, using the architecture around them to full advantage, and Valkyrie looks like she’s having a field day, mouth perpetually curled upward as she cuts down the clay-like creatures that seemed to multiply upon being wounded if the hits weren’t lethal. Steve breathes in deep and exhales slow: she’s jovial, and Steve tells himself she more than knows her way around the assessment of a battlefield.

He’s not as convincing as he used to think he was, as a rule, if the way his body stays taut enough to threaten breaking at a touch is anything to judge by.

“They said they’d call if they needed help.” Steve says aloud; maybe hearing it will help. “They haven’t called, so.”

Bucky half huffs, half hums in agreement, and Steve thinks about turning toward him, but his gaze is fixed. There are _so many_ hostiles...

“Come here.” 

Bucky’s gripping at his arms and bowing his head into the base of Steve’s neck, sighing wearily even as Steve leans into the touch; even as Steve doesn’t quite untense for the contact. 

“Believe it or not, I get it,” Bucky murmurs just to the side of Steve’s ear, and Steve can’t help the shiver that the tickle of his breath draws up and down his spine.

“When I was in Wakanda, and you were,” Steve can feel the hard swallow work down Bucky’s throat; “they were coming at you because of _me_...”

“Buck,” Steve starts, but Bucky shakes his head and drops a kiss to the peak of Steve’s collarbone.

“You have to learn to trust them.”

Steve frowns.

“I do,” Steve says firmly, absolutely certain, because that’s not in question. “I do trust them.”

He trusted them with his life, more times than he can count. He trusted some of them to protect _Bucky_—_his_ freedom, _his_ life, the impossible promise of him somewhere in the universe, able to rescue and bring back against all odds—and that means so much more.

“I know,” Bucky replies; “but you trust them to fit into a unit at your side, where you’re calculating your own presence as a given, your own strengths as a,” he pauses, runs fingers across the hairs at Steve’s nape; “a protective factor.”

Steve considers that; maybe. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. 

_Maybe_.

“Trust them to value themselves enough to be safe,” Bucky continues, his tone measured and gentle and something soft for Steve to linger in; it takes some time, but it drowns out the din of the television for more than a moment. It beckons Steve to close his eyes and breathe. 

“Trust them to value the mission enough to calculate risk accordingly,” Bucky’s voice has a lulling quality, and Steve chases the warmth it kindles as a balm for his worry; “and know that whatever happens, those very things would have brought you hope and hurt just the same if you were there.”

Steve takes a moment to soak in the words, and he’s not great at taking advice—never was. He’s not great at stopping to listen. But there’s only one person who’s ever had much of a chance of getting through to him without the world ending, without crisis and life-or-death tipping the scales.

And Steve spares a glance at the screen, watches Sam shoot through two targets, setting them ablaze, before he sinks deeper into Bucky’s hold around him and sighs. 

“You’re a wise man, James Barnes.” The amused huff of laughter should probably be a given, and should probably be routine, but _damn_ if the sound doesn’t still spark something amorphous and feather-light through Steve’s chest.

“One of us has to be.”

Steve bats at Bucky’s hand in mock-offense and misses his touch when he lets go, but Steve’s eyes are back on the television after a few moments: without Bucky’s immediate presence Steve feels sucked back in, only ever-so-slightly assuaged when met with dramatic camera angles and the hysterical shouting of an amateur play-by-play from the reporter. 

But then Bucky’s placing a phone into his hands—his own phone, but with the screen showing an unfamiliar profile. Steve frowns before he takes the device.

“What’s this?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, at first, and Steve turns, gaze pressing the question insistently because the dark grey background is backlit in a way he’s never seen, all the symbols familiar in theory, but making absolutely no sense.

“You know those times you actually listened to me and sat the fuck down when we were helping with the rebuild?” Bucky asks, and it’s a bit of a non sequitur, but Steve’s more motivated to contest the spirit of the words first.

“You make it sound like that was few and far between,” Steve protests; “I sat out a _lot_.”

“For you? Yeah, okay,” Bucky smirks, but gives it to him. “One day every two weeks is a lot.” 

“Sometimes two,” Steve frowns, which is absolutely not a pout. “Plus I took breaks!” he adds, still a little indignant. “Ate lunch and played catch and did,” he gestures a little aimlessly before he ends on an admittedly weak note: “things, on break.”

But the point still stands.

“That’s right,” Bucky nods, a picture of helpful innocence save for the glint of mischief in his eyes. “You ate all the brownies that one time.” Steve groans.

“Uh huh, _thank you_ for bringing _that_ up,” and the container had been labelled _For S—_ and the rest after ‘S’ had been smudged with moisture in the fridge, and Bucky and Sam had been known to portion food for Steve because otherwise he’d shrug off eating, but = felt guilty to waste their efforts if it was _there_, so Steve hadn’t known the brownies weren’t just an indulgent treat left as...positive reinforcement for having taken breaks _all_ that week, maybe, instead of being for one of the men on their cleanup team to give his daughter, Sienna, who was coming to visit him later in the day before they went out to celebrate her _birthday_. 

It was an honest _mistake_.

Nevermind that she was thrilled that Captain America—old and new, because Sam came along in large part to laugh at Steve who was still blushing and stumbling over apologies—got her an ice cream sundae as big as her head. Nevermind that Bucky had brought him brownies every day for a goddamn _month_, at home or on site, and cackled at him relentlessly.

Nevermind that Steve had felt like the sun was rising for the very first time to just watch Bucky laugh, and to bask in the sound.

“_Anyway_,” Bucky redirects his attention with a nod of his head toward Steve’s hands; “my point was, when you were being very good and taking a breather for a whole day, Sam and I would spend some time with the shield.” 

Steve blinks; he hadn’t known that. Admittedly, in those early days, when Bucky was gone and Steve was on his own, he spent most of his energy and attention fighting the voices in his head and his heart that told him the idea of having everyone back, of having Bucky in his arms every night was a fantasy, a twisted illusion; he spent so much time in those days trying to convince himself it was real, and that Bucky would be home, and that he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t gone—that Steve didn’t have to be broken forever, like he’d feared for so long in the dark on his own. He could be whole again.

He _was_ whole again.

So Bucky helping Sam with the shield is news to him, but maybe that’s not so surprising, given the givens.

“Sometimes he still asks me stuff, so I’m on the server FRIDAY admins for the team.” It takes Steve a minute, and a few pointed looks from Bucky at his phone, to get the hint: he’s given Steve access to FRIDAY’s Avengers mainframe. He never asked for it after he retired, never thought to—which probably says something—but likewise, it was never offered.

Until just now.

“And now, she’s going to send you updates for mission critical events, so you can blink once every hour and come to the table for dinner when it’s done if they haven’t wrapped the battle up in the next…” he cranes his neck toward the kitchen, looking for the timer on the stove: “twenty-seven minutes.”

And Steve blinks again, unsure how to respond, exactly: the soup smells delicious. He’s glad, abstractly, to have the promise of it again, if he doesn’t have to stay glued to the action on his own; but that’s tangential, peripheral because what Bucky gave him, let him have, he trusts him to—

“Why did Sam call you?”

The question that does come out isn’t what he expected, or feels strongest, but then: he’s not sure what he expected, really.

“Because,” Bucky takes it in stride as ever, not asking about the surface-level, the easily-answered _why_ of Bucky’s own relative expertise with the shield—Steve sometimes wishes they’d had the chance to share it, but if he’s honest, it’s mostly because it’s hot as hell to watch Bucky throw it with the absolute precision of his sniper’s eye. But Bucky, because he’s Bucky and he knows Steve through and through, sees what Steve really means: the concern for what Sam needed that he couldn’t tell Steeve himself, not that he needed to tell Steve everything, not that he couldn’t go to Bucky because Bucky’s his friend in his own right now, but _Steve_ gave him the shield, and if there’s issue or concern or blame then it rests with him, it—

But Bucky knows, _sees_, and goes directly to what Steve’s really after, and gives unreservedly. 

“Sam didn’t just want to know what it was like to be Captain America,” he explains simply; “he needed to know how to navigate the world around him _as_ Captain America, and to hear if things were gonna be okay when it all shook out.” Bucky grins, a little rueful. “Subtle difference, maybe, but there’s literally only one person in the world who’s ever helped a guy figure out how to go from living like a regular grunt to carrying the frisbee.”

And there’s an avalanche of feeling, of memory: of Bucky after Azzano and that brave face of his, the face Steve knew for what it was in flashes, at spare-glimpses when the mask slipped, and Steve still feels the clench in his chest for missing so much of what Bucky didn’t say, of what was done to him, when Bucky stood and laughed and clasped Steve’s shoulder and listened to Steve’s halting attempts to explain how strange and new and wonderful and _terrible_ the world felt, how ill-equipped he was. How he didn’t know if he could be what he needed to be; how now that it was all at his fingertips he was afraid he was insufficient, that he wasn’t enough, that he couldn’t be all this, he’s just a kid from Brooklyn, and maybe he never said as much out loud but in his heart he always knew that he was only as much as he _was_, as a kid from Brooklyn, because he had Bucky at his side making him stronger, taller, balancing sense to his no-it’s-not-recklessness, and then Steve had been left without Bucky, with no tempering of his first instinct to jump and hope there was somewhere to land only after he was already midair, and he _needed_ Bucky then more than maybe he ever had but he couldn’t ask it of him, Bucky didn’t sign up for what Steve had become, he—

There’s a palm on his face, and Steve’s eyes snap to the ones waiting for him, soft, and Steve’s back in the now and there’s Bucky, and that’s the only thing that Steve’s ever needed, really.

“Sometimes, outside perspective is key,” Bucky draws him back to the issue at hand, and Steve’s gaze flickers to the television for an instant—he hadn’t been watching, but then FRIDAY hadn’t sounded an alarm—but then he’s back to Bucky, who’s running his thumb back and forth along Steve’s jaw. “That’s all.”

Steve breathes in: shaky, but it feels a little freeing.

“Don’t overthink it,” and when Bucky says it, Steve thinks he means far more than just Sam, than just the battle streaming on the news behind them, and for all that Steve can feel in those words, he leans into Bucky’s touch and closes his eyes and exhales heavy: 

“Okay.” And he means it.

They hold there for a long stream of breaths until the scent of spices wafts over and Bucky hums, pressing lips to the corner of Steve’s mouth.

“I gotta stir that or it’s gonna get all burnt at the bottom.”

“Can’t have that,” Steve turns to catch Bucky’s lips and kiss him properly, and Bucky grins into it, slow and deep before he pulls back, pot audibly simmering in the background, and pushes back with a hand at Steve’s chest.

“Tell me if Wanda shows up,” he says with a pat to Steve’s sternum before he walks toward the kitchen. Steve’s lips turn down, though not just as the request—if FRIDAY’s going to be keeping an eye out, he would have liked more time with Bucky’s mouth on his own.

“Why Wanda?” he calls toward Bucky where he’s bent over the stovetop.

“She’s like, reserves now, right? At least for the time being?” he lifts the spoon to his lips and tastes, and then flinches because it’s too hot, because Bucky’s fucking impatient sometimes and Steve only just manages to stifle a laugh at the way Bucky glares at the sauce like it being _on the stove_ and _also hot_ is both a surpirse and an offense. “Only really have to pay attention if they get themselves into something they have to call her in for.”

He’s got a point, but then he’s also tasting the sauce again five seconds after he burned his tongue, with just a few puffs of breath spared this time to cool it off. But Steve’s grinning to himself when he settles back on the couch, grabbing his book and keeping his phone on his lap, and making it through a page or two between glancing at the app and appreciating the view when Bucky bends to check the bread in the oven. 

By the time dinner’s ready, the battle is over, announced by a banner across the screen of Steve’s StarkPhone: _Mission Accomplished_, complete with a burst of animated fireworks, and it’s warm in Steve’s chest for once, how clearly _Tony_ that kind of announcement is. But then another banner flickers on:

_Save App, Y/N?_

Of course FRIDAY knows who’s phone’s accessing her databases, and probably knows just as clearly who gave him access, and with what intent. Which means Bucky was always going to put the ball in Steve’s court, whether he needed to watch the team like a hawk for his own peace of mind. Whether he could trust his friends the way Bucky told him he’d need to, had been _right_ to tell him he’d need to. 

Steve’s fingertip hovers for a second before he taps the _N_ and the app deletes itself without a trace. And Steve doesn’t feel like the world’s ending. In fact, he feels...fine. Better than fine. 

So he stands, and he tosses the phone onto the coffee table, and he walks up behind Bucky, resting hands on his hips and nipping at his neck and Bucky smiles even as he tries to shrug him away so he can finish their meal, eventually resorting to swatting Steve’s wrist with the serving spoon and leaving a stripe of broth on Steve’s skin, and Steve maybe huffs at him for it, but then Bucky turns and grabs his hand and sucks Steve’s arm clean, and that’s more than worth it. 

“Set the table, punk,” he pushes Steve toward the cutlery drawer and Steve thinks, yes. Definitely. 

So much better than _fine_. 

__________________

Steve’s laying down the preliminary lines, and frankly he doesn’t have to look to know how they stretch and fall, because there’s no angle or pose Bucky could be in that Steve can’t picture in his mind with perfect clarity, be it for having seen it and committed it to memory or for the way he knows Bucky’s body better than he probably knows his own, because he cares about it deeper: either way, Steve knows what he’s drawing without studying his subject. 

But studying his subject is one of his absolute favorite things in the world. 

“Whatcha doin’, punk?” 

Steve glances up through his lashes in that way he knows undoes Bucky just that little bit, his lips quirking upward, only faltering the slightest bit when he meets Bucky’s eyes: they’re intent, careful, assessing, and oh, but Steve knows what he’s looking for, because sometimes Steve wakes up and it’s Europe in the cold, it’s New York too many years after he could really call it home, it’s _five years_ without—_without_, and drowning with it, even without knowing what it truly was, what it would be, what they would have, still fucking _drowning—_

Sometimes, Steve wakes up breathless but Bucky’s hands are warm and safe on his skin, his chest rising and falling and _real_ against him, and he can fall asleep most times because drowning instead in those facts, in this reality that’s his, that’s _theirs_ is enough to ease the drumming of his heart for fear and lingering despair: but sometimes, once he wakes to the day again before Bucky does he watches, desperate, and sometimes Bucky will wake to Steve sketching him because Steve needs to find the intricacies, the things that make Bucky in this moment something instantiated in the universe just once, just now, to prove that he’s real and he’s here: something more than Steve can imagine, can conjure to mind because he knows the laws of physics and gravity and the bow of Bucky’s lips and the divot of his chin but now Steve knows the feeling of the planes of his chest and the beat of his heart and he’s real, they’re real, it’s _real_— 

Sometimes, Steve watches Bucky from behind his sketchbook with heavy shadows under his eyes, and that’s what Bucky’s looking for, but Steve lets his mouth curl wider: this isn’t one of those mornings. 

And once Bucky’s satisfied that’s the case, he smiles too. 

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” Steve quips, leans across the mattress to flick Bucky’s nose because sometimes he’s a child, sometimes he’s weightless, sometimes he’s overjoyed in the everyday truth of this man in his bed, in his life, shaping his world. And Bucky chases his fingers as Steve draws back and puts pencil to paper again, nipping blindly and catching the nail of Steve’s pinky finger because sometimes Bucky’s weightless and overjoyed, too. 

They’re lucky. They’re so goddamn lucky. < 

“Mmm,” Bucky settles back, eyes dancing as he resumes the position he’d had; knows Steve likes him to hold the reference. “Can I see?” 

>Steve bites his lip, considering: sometimes Bucky doesn’t get to see his work because he puts it away before he leans in and devours Bucky’s mouth, Bucky’s body because he’s hungry or he needs tangible proof of him or he can’t help but to touch; but today feels gentle, warm. 

“When it’s done.” 

Bucky hums, contented; he loves Steve’s art, always had, and Steve still doesn’t understand how he deserves Bucky, how he ever did. 

“How much longer do I need to stay still?” 

“Just a little bit more,” and Steve doesn’t need to justify when he’s sketching Bucky, but he actually does have an ulterior motive this time. “New pencils,” he pauses, twirling the sleek black 7B around his fingers with a suggestive quirk of his eyebrow. 

“Why is it,” Bucky groans, a little theatrically; “that sometimes I have to stay still, and other times I can get up and,” he squints and rubs his eyes, fucking adorable with it; “I dunno, make toast, or get a drink, or,” and Steve doesn’t jump at all, but god_damn_ is it close, when Bucky’s foot pokes at Steve’s thigh, snaking toward him without Steve noticing and stroking up toward his hips and back down, safe beneath the covers. 

“Put my arms around you,” Bucky muses idly, even as his toes slide closer, teasing the tender skin of Steve’s inner thigh. “Massage your shoulders,” Bucky rolls his own shoulders, like he has no idea the effect that his bared throat as he stretches has on Steve. 

“Kiss you neck,” and he licks his lips, sucks at his bottom lip like the damned minx that he is; “grab your ass.” 

“Usually not that one,” Steve says, and it takes everything he’s got to keep his voice steady, but he manages; though it does take _everything_ he’s got so his hand stops moving along the page and Bucky sees it, and his grin turns a little predatory. Steve takes a deep breath and makes himself move his pencil, makes himself finish with a detached air that he really thinks he nails. 

“That one moves _me_, which makes it hard to draw a straight fuckin’ line.” 

Bucky snorts. 

“Everything after getting a drink _moves_ you,” Bucky shoots back, but settles back against the sheets. 

“Some things I really _can’t_ compensate for from the wrists down,” Steve counters, because when it comes to Bucky’s hands on him, he’ll compensate as much as physically possible and then some to keep them on him, but even a supersoldier can’t be expected to keep from smudging the graphite when fingers that know his too damn well are tracing the cleft of his ass and teasing the globes of muscle and—well. 

“Like my hands on your ass,” Bucky’s grin’s grown wide enough that it looks like it might hurt. 

Steve snorts. 

“Like _that_, yeah.” 

Bucky throws his weight back a bit, the bed shifting them both with the motion of it, and Steve stares unapologetically at the slow way the curl of his lips fades but just seems to seep inward, suffusing the whole of him with its warmth, its joy, loose in his limbs where he sprawls for a second before resuming his pose for Steve to document. 

But the moment stretches, and Bucky raises a brow when Steve doesn’t go back to drawing him, and Steve just watches him, just studies him, just drinks him in and it’s tight and huge and glorious in his chest and it still takes him by surprise, somehow; takes him over in the barest of instants, seemingly out of nowhere. 

“I could draw every inch of you with my eyes closed,” Steve finds himself saying, soft and a little breathless even as it’s spilling from his lips because he’s full of want for Bucky’s touch and Bucky’s body and Bucky’s heat against him, inside him, around him; but he’s equally full of wonder for Bucky’s self and soul and place in this life next to Steve—it’s so _much_, and Steve still wants more of it, all of it, forever. 

“But every time I look at you,” and Bucky’s watching him curiously, now, but so honest and open and trusting and that is a _gift_: “every time I study you, and put it to paper, I still find some new thing. Some,” he swallows, and feels the threat of a flush on his cheeks; “some new detail that catches light just right, and it’s…” 

Bucky’s pushing down the sheets and crawling over the duvet toward Steve, pausing to take the sketchbook from his hands and close it gently, reaching over Steve to set it on the nightstand before he straddles Steve, lowering his weight so that Steve leans back onto the bed with Bucky hovering over him. 

“Fuckin’ sap,” Bucky breathes out, warm against Steve’s lips before he kisses Steve slow, enamored: as much of a sap in the way he explores the lines of Steve’s mouth like it’s the first time, like he can somehow still be infatuated with the shape, like he can still find some new taste on Steve’s tongue, like he can map some new depth if he tries hard enough, wants full enough, and Steve’s breathless when Bucky finally pulls away, careful, lashes fanned to his cheekbones and mouth red and wet when he blinks up at Steve, who’s dazed to the point of effervescent, shapeless joy that only knows direction in the way he holds to Bucky, and the irrepressible curve of his lips. 

“Can’t draw for shit, you know that,” Bucky says softly, nosing at the curve of Steve’s chin, kissing soft at the point of his jaw. “Can’t put to paper how your eyes dance, or how your smile lights up the whole fuckin’ world,” and Steve swallows around the heart that’s damn near floating, racing ecstatic and weightless near the base of his throat, some miraculous vibration seeming helpless but to rise and rise and rise. 

And Bucky’s reaching up—Steve’s hand still on his arm—to cup Steve’s face, and Steve’s breathless when Bucky lifts up and presses gentle lips to Steve’s forehead, and speaks low: 

“Doesn’t mean I can’t find my own ways to let you know what you mean.” 

Steve feels those words, and the emotion entwined in them, like a current, a shiver under the skin, thick in his veins and it’s that absolutely perfect weight of it that finally settles his pulse into a rhythm so content, so goddamn blissful Steve doesn’t know if he can stand it, if his body is built to hold it, but knows that he’ll be damned if he ever lets it go. 

“Or, for that matter,” Bucky draws back, eyes brighter at the edges now, lips curled around something sly and hungry that rises fevered through Steve’s body, hot at the base of his spine; “that I can’t find new ways I might just be able to…” 

And the base of his spine is exactly where Bucky’s hand presses to Steve’s bare skin, deft fingers easing him back up to sitting, then reaching to cup the swell of Steve’s ass, massaging wickedly until Steve arches his back and Bucky takes the opportunity to lift Steve higher from the bulk of his thighs, settling him unapologetically onto Bucky’s waiting lap so that momentum crashes his lips into Bucky’s waiting mouth to consume and be consumed in kind, equally matched in some cosmic way that Steve can’t actually believe could possibly exist in any other place, alongside any other soul in the universe: not like this.< 

“Move you,” Bucky nips at Steve’s lip, dragging teeth on the already swollen pout and Steve’s lost to the sensation, moaning without thinking to hold back, and Bucky’s hands are circling Steve’s own, lifting them slowly and bringing them both, hot and nearly shaking, to replace Steve’s mouth against his lips, warm and tender, just the wet circle of his kiss at Steve’s pulse-points where he shapes words: 

“From the wrists,” and oh, oh this menace that owns Steve’s whole fucking heart, proving his point while he offers Steve the only thing Steve never thought he’d know, maybe because he never bothered or stopped to envision _anything_ that could possibly be like _this_: 

And then, beyond Steve’s full comprehension, the heel of Bucky’s left hand is somehow firm at the peak of his groin, pressure expertly increasing against the base of Steve’s hardening cock and it presses the breath from his lungs in a punch and Steve’s wide eyed and loose-jawed, knows his pupils are blown as he watches Bucky still mouthing at his wrists, gaze _searing_ as he flicks his attention upward and captures Steve with his stare and downright purrs as he kisses the palm of Steve’s hand almost delicately, all while slipping his own palm around Steve’s length as he breathes out: 

“_Down_.” 


	11. XI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Nat was your family,” Bucky had said to him one night, when they’d found out about the wave of memorials for Tony being constructed, which they both ached for in their way; memorials to Tony, the savior of half the universe with the snap of his fingers, but none to the other selfless move, the other sacrifice play, and Bucky had known where Steve’s head went without Steve saying a word when Bucky had added simply:
> 
> “Without her? You would have been alone, and you can’t,” Bucky’d swallowed, and squeezed Steve shoulder so fucking tight; and his eyes were wide, and Steve couldn’t help but to hurt a little for how much Bucky saw, how much he always had—there was a part of Steve that was standing by the steps after they’d put the last of his family in the cold ground, with the same hard grasp over his shoulder reminding him that she wasn’t the last, she wasn’t the _last_, and Buck’d been right: Steve Rogers, alone, could get by—but only just. Only barely. 
> 
> Only half-alive.

“The Stark Industries Ivanovna Center for Innovation in Trauma Rehabilitation and Recovery.” 

Bucky breathes out, leaning back in his chair with an air of accomplishment. They’d been hashing out particulars for a few hours now, and Steve’s fed the puppy they’d decided to foster, sketched a bird’s nest in the tree that bangs the window when it storms, made the tea Bruce had left them before he went back into space for the foreseeable future (_space_, and even now that’s still a head trip), baked bread (that didn’t rise in the oven, despite Steve doing _everything right_, and Bucky’ll laugh because he bet Steve the yeast was expired when they brought it from the last of the SI properties they’d been staying at in the first place), and then, admittedly, sat with their sweet little Staffy—kind of adorably-named Stilton—after he’d finished his food, scritching his bunched-up neck as he watched Bucky chew on a pen and jot notes and banter happily with the holoscreen projections of Shuri and Pepper (and Morgan when she wandered by) as they discussed the formal launch of the bioengineering initiative Bucky had taken to Pepper a few months prior. He’d learned a great deal in Wakanda, dove into everything there was to learn, initially just wanting to understand what was done to heal him and, later, how to maintain his arm, but he’d always been partial to science and math, and had a firm belief in making what you learned from a book do something worthwhile in the real world.

Steve feels both a pang of loss, and a surge of warmth when Bucky says the project’s name out loud; he knew Bucky and Natasha had spoken once or twice at least, when Steve had dragged everyone to Wakanda to check on him, but it seemed he’d missed a good chunk of their interactions. They weren’t friends, exactly, but they were far from enemies, and Bucky mourned her loss for more than just her role in bringing him back to the land of the living, or vicariously for the heartbreak it had caused Steve.

“She was your family,” Bucky had said to him one night, when they’d found out about the wave of memorials for Tony being constructed, which they both ached for in their way; memorials to Tony, the savior of half the universe with the snap of his fingers, but none to the other selfless move, the other sacrifice play, and Bucky has known where Steve’s head went without Steve saying a word when Bucky had added simply:

“Without her? You would have been alone, and you can’t,” Bucky’d swallowed, and squeezed Steve shoulder so fucking tight; and his eyes were wide, and Steve couldn’t help but to hurt a little for how much Bucky saw, how much he always had—there was a part of Steve that was standing by the steps after they’d put the last of his family in the cold ground, with the same hard grasp over his shoulder reminding him that she wasn’t the last, she wasn’t the _last_, and Buck’d been right: Steve Rogers, alone, could get by—but only just. Only barely. 

Only half-alive.

“Without her, you,” Bucky had cleared his throat and struggled to find his words; “there might not’ve been,” and Steve understood the gaps, what was meant to fill them, because Steve wasn’t stupid; he knew he could be impulsive, reckless even with a guiding hand beside him but without, he knew he could get careless, could get lost and if he’d been lost, wholly beyond the ache in his chest that never went away, Steve didn’t want to consider what he might have done, how there might not have been enough of him left to act or think or be—how he might have failed even deeper, even more irrepably and Natasha was often the only thing that held him back, made him present even when the present was hellish, and kept him just-this-side of sane. And Steve had shivered in Bucky’s arms, confronted with the truth of her that baldly, but Bucky’d just traced a tender fingertip down Steve’s cheek, resting at the corner of his mouth: that simple touch so knowing and real and simple, but vital. All that Steve didn’t know could fill him and soothe him; everything at once.

“I’m grateful as hell for her,” Bucky had breathed, and Steve had swallowed hard and kissed Bucky harder, because he thinks that the best he can do to honor Nat’s sacrifice now is to live, fully and wholehearted, in the world she made possible. 

But hearing this center, meant to help and to heal, named after _her_ is, it—

It soothes something lodged deep in his chest that he hadn’t realized had been railing there quite so hard until it’s calmed, and Steve’s hand in Stilton’s fur pauses, and he sucks in a deep breath, lets it out slow, and meets Bucky’s eyes, already trained on him, always intimately aware of Steve in a way that used to rankle, once upon a time, and now just feels _warm_.

“Sufficiently verbose to sound impressive,” Shuri needles Bucky a little, commenting on the name.

“Iciturrrrr,” Morgan says as she walks into the view of the projection, drawing out the final letter of an imagined acronym. “S’catchy.”

“It’s a fitting tribute,” Pepper says, eyes trailing Morgan as she continues on her way, hands full of circuit boards, if Steve sees it correctly. Shuri looks a little proud at the sight. 

“They both would be honored,” Pepper adds meaningfully; “and it’s going to help so many people.”

“That’s the plan,” Bucky nods, spinning left and right in his chair. “We’ll need your help with patents and such, what’s yours and what can be shared, and what can’t be,” he nods at Shuri, but then his expression turns sly. “I mean, I can guess at what’s new, because I’ll have probably come up with it and it’ll be more awesome, obviously—”

“_Ingcuka_,” Shuri says warningly, and Steve perks up a bit; they’re like siblings, nagging each other, going back and forth, and there’s a sheen of Bucky with Becca to it, but it’s also something wholly new and genuine and Bucky bites the grin from his lips but Steve can tell it takes effort; Shuri’s face is stoic but even across the connection, the mischievous sparkle in her eyes is evident.

“Only with your tutelage, of course!” Bucky says, wide-eyed and playing innocent in the way only the very clearly guilty can.

“You think you’re funny,” Shuri scoffs, half-scolds, and Bucky lets the smirk curl just a little.

“I,” he says, pointing the pen still in his hand in her direction: “am hilarious,” and his grin grows a little broader as he seems to stumble upon a new layer of banter to unveil. 

“I believe I have video of you laughing so hard you spat your tea _onto_ your brother with how hilarious you think I am.”

Shuri’s eyes narrow. “How on earth would you get video—”

“You’re the one who taught me how to access your private security systems,” Bucky grins broadly, now, and Shuri studies him for a long few moments before she rolls her eyes and huffs.

“You are very lucky you’re cute, white boy.”

“You know I love you dearly,” Bucky says warmly, and sincerely, because there is so much genuine love between them, Steve knows that and is so very grateful for it, that the royal family offered it to him when he needed it, and that Bucky was able to build that bond when he was most vulnerable, yet most himself. Because Bucky Barnes at his core was a boy, a man, who cared for people, who loved unreservedly. 

“Hmm,” Shuri eventually hums, but doesn’t fight the curving of her lips, just a bit of a grin. “General rule of thumb is that what is ours is yours to recreate with SI resources,” she answers, which Steve knows lets Bucky cross a line off his endless list of questions to address for their meeting, because the legal system in Wakanda was nothing like what Steve was familiar with, and foreign collaboration had opened a number of logistical questions that had never come up before. “For domestic distribution, at least to start.”

And yep: Bucky nods, and flips his pen around to strike out the line item.

“We will continue our global initiatives in the meantime,” Shuri confirms, and then Pepper takes the lead.

“And we’ll continue with outreach and recovery as our foremost focus, while Bruce takes up the philanthropic and humanitarian arms,” Pepper paints the broad strokes. “And Bucky, you’ll be joining the biotech research team in the interest of taking it public by next spring. And I’m giving you full access to Tony’s private research, from the arc reactor to Rhodey’s leg braces. Anything we might have that can be implemented on its own or that can be useful in adapting the Wakandan designs that depend on the vibranium reserves exclusively,” Shuri nods in agreement, there. “I’m hoping you can help me sort through what’s useful to share and what might be,” she tilts her head: “better off the books.”

“I can certainly try,” Bucky assures her, and then brightens. “Helen says she’s willing to relocate at least temporarily to help us get off the ground,” he tells them happily, and both women make noises of surprised delight.

“What about her grant?” Shuri asks, enthusiastic but wary; Helen had received massive funding to work on new vaccination schedules for the Returned, given that the five years of pathogen mutation they’d missed out on developing an immunity toward had been enough to lay thousands of them low and overflow hospitals worldwide.

“Apparently, she’s got a great team already up and running, and the funding bodies are happy to extend it on the grounds that she’s splitting her time with Stark Industries.”

“Household name,” Shuri says with a nod and a smile.

“Plus,” Bucky says before spinning his chair around entirely at the creak of the floor in the hallway. Steve turns as well to see their new houseguest stifling a yawn, still in a sleep shirt and oversized sweats, and taking in the goings-on in the living room with slowly-sharpening eyes. 

“We’ll also be integrating the _newest_ member of our team,” Bucky gestures her over with a grin; “who was loath to get out of bed this morning.”

“It’s not my fault your guest room has the most comfortable bed in the world,” Wanda says, a little petulantly but with a wry smile, and that makes Steve so happy to see, because Wanda’s road has been rough, in different ways than his own, and she’d found herself again, anew in gradual waves, but watching her brighten like this is a goddamn gift.

“Is it one of yours?” Pepper asks, and it takes Steve a second to reorient to what she’s looking to know: the bed. Bucky’d taken to making furniture in Wakanda when he wasn’t tending to the land or the animals or pestering Shuri in the lab, and Steve would be the first to say he’d gotten damn good at it.

Steve’s also a fan of the sweat on Bucky’s muscles as he saws and shapes and carves; Steve’s also a fan of licking that sweat _off_ of Bucky’s muscles, but those things do not detract from what Bucky’s cultivated as a genuine skill.

“I’ll be adding your endorsement to my testimonials,” Bucky shrugs off the praise.

“Regular renaissance man,” Pepper whistles low, and Bucky chuckles.

“Gotta earn my keep somehow.”

“Wanda,” Pepper turns her attention. “Mind coming by the old compound site? I have to check on construction this afternoon and I’ve got some of your things from the Tower.” She’d moved back in, recovering and rebuilding the best she could, as soon as she could stand being there without breaking down for the memories, and the hole it represented, the loss it drove home; had come back to New York a good while after she’d promised to still fight, though only in the gravest of need. Now she’s staying with Steve and Bucky to get up to speed on Bucky’s vision for the Center before she goes to meet with Shuri to discuss how her powers could potentially augment their technology, if Shuri can find a way to harness and channel her gifts that might prove useful, though not without first facing the demons still fresh for her on Wakandan soil—_I can’t help anyone if my mind is still more clouded than clear_, Wanda has said simply, and had offered nothing about whether her heart needed the same clarity, and Steve thinks he couldn’t be her. He was a shell, he sees it now: he was a shell when Bucky was gone and he hadn’t even _known_ the things, the depths, the soul-searing truths he sees now, but if he’d _known_, and then _lost_, and then watched the world return and halves of hearts made whole again all around and yet still been left bleeding, he—

His eyes drift to Bucky, just tracing the lines of him like a mathematical proof, fingertips itching to touch and make sure, and no. No, Steve doesn’t think he’d be as strong as Wanda Maximoff. Not in this. 

“I think I left everything on your floor that you wanted to keep for when you’re in the city,” Pepper’s talking, and Steve tries to calm his pulse and rejoin the now. He focuses on Bucky, watches his chest rise and fall ever so slightly, and it mostly works. “But anything that’s replaceable we can make a list for F.R.I.D.A.Y. to have delivered when you’re next here.”

“I’ll head out after breakfast,” Wanda confirms, though Bucky chimes in.

“It’s closer to lunch,” he says teasingly, and she pushes at his shoulder in retaliation.

“Brunch, then,” she concedes, and Bucky’s smile at her sends something warm and delicate curling in Steve’s stomach, rising up through his chest: family, and the ease of it. The truth of it.

The joy of it.

“Take care, ladies,” Bucky turns that grin to Pepper and Shuri before they all sign off. Bucky makes to stand, but Wanda nudges him back into the chair gently.

“You sit,” she says before eyeing both Steve and Bucky as she makes her way toward the kitchen. “Want me to make some coffee for the two of you while I’m at it?”

“Please,” Bucky answers for the both of them, though Wanda had shooed him back into his chair because it was a non-question, really, as she well knew, and so she smiles as she heads down the stairs, and when she’s out of sight Bucky stands and crosses over to settle next to Steve, lounging bonelessly and leaning up against Steve’s side, half-draped on his shoulder. Steve reaches up and starts playing with Bucky’s hair, lilting and tender without trying. Bucky twists after a few minutes of Steve’s attention, tapping him on the chin.

“What?” Bucky asks, eyes wide and soft as he calls Steve on that little extra bit of care he’s lavishing just as a function of Bucky being...Bucky.

“You’re amazing,” Steve exhales, turning to watch Bucky who’s still resting on the globe of Steve’s shoulder. He furrows his brow, either in confusion or to rebuff, and neither is acceptable. Bucky needs to know, always, that he’s incredible.

“You’re just,” Steve shakes his head ruefully; “you learned how to do all this, just like you used to talk about, and then so much more, and you’re just,” he reaches and cups Bucky’s cheek, a little wonderingly, but that’s not new—sometimes it just strikes Steve, how Bucky used to talk about being a doctor so he could learn how to fix Steve’s illnesses when the doctors they knew all fell short, and now he’s helping organize an entire initiative to reach more people, to improve lives. Sometimes, Steve gets blindsided all over again by the way Bucky’s built himself anew out of the unthinkable, how he still manages to smile and hold Steve close and _feel_ as deep as he used to. At least with Steve.

“I’m so fucking _proud_ of you,” Steve finally says and Bucky’s entire countenance softens, and he latches his mouth onto Steve’s neck, up his jaw and around to his lips and Steve just sighs into the kiss, grateful for this, just this.

All of _this_.


	12. XII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s heart is still beating just a little quick, and Bucky’s chest is lifting just a little shallowly, a little shakily under Steve’s touch, and god, this man. This _man_. 
> 
> “Have I told you recently,” Steve leans to nuzzle teasingly at Bucky’s left nipple; “just how much I love you?”

It’s a common one, that night. The dream visits every so often, no pattern to it, no obvious triggers. And Steve’s learned to live with that.

But it’s not what it appears.

It starts with the vision that Wanda had given him so long ago, before she even fully knew what it was she was doing at all: the image of the dance hall after the war, the fear in his chest at odds with the warmth of Peggy in his arms. It usually ends quickly, the clear sense of _wrongness_ in it, the lack of truth and the impossibility of that life too strong to stay. Usually, he wakes up quick, and it’s no more or less than any other rapid-firing of stray thoughts in his sleep than anything else.

But this time, it doesn’t fade. This time, it doesn’t stop.

He’s still dancing, but he’s in a living room. He doesn’t recognize it at first because he’s never been there; so it’s understandable. But he’s seen it: the backdrop to birthday parties and anniversary celebrations and Christmas mornings and candid joy—Peggy had asked him to share her photo albums often enough for Steve to remember her old family room after a prompt or two, and his feet don’t move much because he _can’t_ dance, no matter the partner, so they mostly just sway and then he’s still in a living room, but this one’s intimately familiar, and much smaller, much dingier, but much more like home, and the arms on him change and a low chuckle echoes and a voice follows _I’m starting to think you’re trying to fuck this up, punk_ and Steve shivers, unsure if that shiver is inside or outside the dream. Bucky’s hands are loose but somehow still firm, steady and sure like they don’t want to touch too much but they want to make sure they’re ready should Steve stumble—and then suddenly they’re gone from his hip only to be replaced with triple force against his hand, and it’s freezing with the kind of cold that’s not just from snow and ice and Steve’s hold, that fabled-impossible hold he’s sobbed and broken clean through for failing, for being insufficient to touch: that hold he’s ached to have managed in the first place slips anyway, gives way and Bucky’s falling, falling and Steve can’t breathe, the tears coming immediately; he blinks, or else his dream-self blinks and he sees Natasha’s face flash before him in the descending figure, the white turning a red-tinged grey he remembers from the terrible aura of Vormir: Steve may not have seen what had happened, and he’d ascended the rocks in response to the visceral pull of the Stone but he’d seen the ledge, and the bloodstains, and he’d nearly vomited before he’d pressed the button to jump again; she’s only there an instant, though, but it’s enough to add a new wave of devastation before Bucky’s hand is slipping from him again: he’s barely conscious on a riverbank and Bucky’s leaving, he’s losing Bucky one more, over and over unending, and his chest hurts with something that has nothing to do with bullets, nothing to do with nearly drowning. He watches Bucky freeze inside a cryo-chamber in Wakanda and the white is terrifyingly reminiscent of water, or of the hollow between his ribs in a bombed-out pub—the same cold in his veins as Bucky’s face is obscured by frost and his expression eerily stilled; he watches a gauntlet snap and the life drain from Tony’s eyes until they’re replaced with Bucky’s, too big as he dissolves into thin air, into dust and Steve falls to his knees and it’s too much, it’s too much and it’s always _loss_ and it hurts every time but Bucky, Bucky gets lost too often, Bucky’s gone at the end of the story too many times and Steve can’t, Steve _can’t_—

He comes awake gasping, choking on air and half-sobs and Bucky’s sitting up with him in an instant, hands braced on his biceps, catching him like a rule.

“Easy,” Bucky hums softly at the shell of his ear, and Steve feels Bucky’s lips brush against him for the trembling in his own limbs, the shaking of his breath and the thunder of his pulse. 

“I don’t, I _don’t_—” Steve tries to speak but his heartbeat pummels the words, makes them barely _sounds_, and mostly unintelligible at that. He shakes his head frantically, and gulps in air so clumsily that it does nothing but make him feel like he’s drowning. 

“Easy, now, breathe,” Bucky murmurs, running hands down is back, over his chest, cupping his face and drawing circles on the apples of his cheeks to ground him, to soothe him and Steve would marvel, will marvel, later, always, at the sheer presence and power of that touch, after so much—after _so much_, and more than that, it’s _his_ and Bucky is _here_; Steve will marvel and give gratitude to the universe for it when he can see past the blurring in his vision but now: now he’s desperate. Now he claws and grasps and holds tight enough to bruise, to break anything or anyone less than _this man_ that Steve needs, and has always needed, and couldn’t go back and find words for how the hell he’d survived without Bucky, ever, for months or years or moments, because he doesn’t know, he doesn’t _know_ and—

“I don’t want,” Steve gasps, and it’s not right, it’s not enough, it doesn't say what’s clenching his lungs, doesn’t name the vise around his throbbing heart but for all the things he feels and doesn’t know the words for, he’s beginning to wonder if what he feels is bigger, is life and death in a way he’d never be able to speak, only know at the base of his soul and feel in his bones and prays to whatever power might be listening that his eyes or his touch or the way he feels against Bucky’s body—and Bucky against his—can say for him. Can make known. 

“You don’t have to,” Bucky presses a long kiss to Steve’s temple, holding against the onslaught of his pulse like an answer and a safeguard, understanding and protection and embrace: “now, _breathe_—”

“I don’t want,” Steve stammers, stumbles, spills at the seams because Bucky is there, Bucky’s hands are under his, Bucky’s mouth is on his skin and it’s safe to break just a little; 

“I don’t want ‘til the end of the line.”

Bucky stills, and if Steve thought the vise in his chest was hard, was tight, that it hurt, then that’s nothing compared to the way his ribs seem to pierce through every organ, slice through every vein when he damn well feels the tensing of Bucky’s whole frame, the sharpness of his inhale that never releases and the twitching, the ever-so-slight loosening of his hold on Steve and fuck, _fuck_, not like that, never like that—

“I don’t want,” Steve rasps, pressing Bucky’s hands almost painfully back against his skin, needing more than he needs air to breathe for Bucky to understand, and never doubt again. 

“I can’t lose you. Ever again,” Steve almost sobs, still unable to catch his breath, fingers tightening all the harder against Bucky’s because he’ll willingly, _happily_ destroy himself so Bucky can know this single, searing, soul-defining truth. 

“There can’t be, an, an end to the line, there can’t, I don’t—”

“Shh,” Bucky’s turning Steve’s body in his hold, laying them both down to press against each other, Steve giving instinctively against Bucky’s chest, Bucky’s hands never leaving some plane of Steve's skin for even a moment. 

“Steve,” Bucky starts, voice low, more a reassuring rumble against Steve’s cheek but Steve can only shake his head, can only plead and beg and _need_—

“I can’t,” he says again, moans it like it hurts because it does, it _does_:

“I _can’t_, Buck, I—”

“Steve—”

“Forever.” And that’s the word. That’s the only word, in the end. That’s the root of the truth that turns sour in his chest when Steve even thinks about anything less. 

“I need, I need you,” Steve chokes out, tangling his arms around Bucky’s torso and pulling him impossibly closer. “Forever.”

Bucky’s chest heaves deep and slow, the sound quiet for a moment before hands come up to thread through Steve’s hair and Bucky whispers, the words full and warm:

“Oh Stevie,” he breathes, and presses lips to the crown of Steve’s head before he whispers, deep and solid and sure. 

“That was _always_ what it meant.”

And Bucky’s heartbeat is strong and steady next to Steve’s ear, and Bucky’s touch is real, a balm: Bucky is beside him, beneath him, wrapped around him and oh. Oh. 

Maybe he’s right, no. No, not maybe. 

That _is_ what it always really meant.

________________

Steve is tracing shapes on Bucky’s sweat-slick chest as they both catch their breaths—Steve’s pretty sure he’ll never stop being amazed by just how gorgeous Bucky is, riding Steve hard, his hair swinging with the rhythm he sets, his lips parted and his eyes hooded and his chest broad above Steve’s body: Steve’s pretty sure he’ll never get tired of that vision, that feeling, but if he _was_ in any doubt? The three orgasms he’d shivered through between Bucky’s thighs were _more_ than enough to convince him otherwise.

Steve’s heart is still beating just a little quick, and Bucky’s chest is lifting just a little shallowly, a little shakily under Steve’s touch, and god, this man. This _man_. 

“Have I told you recently,” Steve leans to nuzzle teasingly at Bucky’s left nipple; “just how much I love you?”

Bucky arches just a little into the attention Steve’s laving over his pec before he stills; Steve feels the shift in his body, not a tension but a change, and he lets his lips close against Bucky’s skin before sliding a hand gently up Bucky’s chest, propping his chin and looking up: Bucky’s lips are turned down, but not unhappily. More curious. Thoughtful.

“No,” Bucky says finally, drawing out the word. “I,” he blinks, a little dazedly, and fumbles for Steve’s hand on his chest and laces their fingers, pressing firm in that way that Bucky has of grounding them both, together, in the moment to remind them they’re _here_. 

“No, I don’t think you have.”

He huffs incredulously as he turns his eyes more fully to Steve. It takes a minute for Steve to process what Bucky says, but it dawns in time to stop the automatic denial spilling out Steve’s already-opened mouth, ready to chide him because of course Steve’s told Bucky he’s his world, the light of his goddamn life, and fine, the last time he did was probably when Bucky sucked him off the night before, hands in Bucky’s hair and thumbs pressing accidental bruises against his cheekbones as he gasped, Bucky’s mouth a fucking wonder as he eased Steve back and forth from the edge so many times that he thought his heart was going to give out for the way his chest _burned_ and he was so far gone he’d have welcomed it, too, he’d have leaned in as he came apart and died at Bucky’s mercy because _god_ was it bliss—and okay. Okay, maybe Steve hadn’t said in _words_, so much as half-intelligible gasps and moans, that he loved—

“I,” Bucky’s speaking again, as Steve’s running the last few minutes over in his mind, and weighing the word, that single syllable against his tongue and charting its length and breadth, and it feels right, it really does, it feels entirely _right_, but not familiar. It feels at home, but somehow not like it’s ever been there before. 

“I don’t think I have either,” Bucky says softly, hazy revelation coloring his tone.

And Steve’s felt the word out properly as soon as Bucky finishes speaking: and no. No, they haven’t. Neither of them. That fairytale moment where they say it to one another, those four magical letters, those three wondrous words—Steve doesn’t know how it’s possible, but they’re impossible people; still. It feels almost absurd. They’d never been spectacular with words, admittedly, and so grand declarations were few and far between, but _still_. They certainly _showed_ it, every day, and they felt it, _god_ did they feel it and so much more—but they’d never said it. Not like that.

“Have we really never...” Steve starts, even more dumbfounded now, knowing it’s true. Bucky puts a hand on Steve’s forearm and eases him to the bed, rather than half on top of Bucky, rolling to the side and propping his head up to look at Steve straight on.

“I can’t believe that we _didn’t_, but,” Bucky shakes his head, a little rueful.

“It felt,” he hums, his mouth working around the word before it comes out: “new?”

“Yeah,” Steve breathes out; “exactly.”

They’re quiet for a stretch of moments, and Steve takes those moments to drink Bucky in, to think on the word and see it in every inch of him. And Steve feels it in every _cell_, in kind. And yet—

“It’s,” Steve bites his lip. “It’s _obvious_, but it also feels,” he pauses contemplating, looking for the right word. 

“Small.”

Bucky’s expression shifts; his lips quirk, just at the corners.

“It’s good, of course it’s good,” Steve says, no longer waiting for the right words and just saying the words that come, in a rush, because what he feels isn’t small, and that not-small thing is driving the crest of something immense through his veins, past his lips. “More than _good_, but,” and Steve pauses, something warm but heavy in his chest surging upward and catching in his throat, coloring the words when they come.

“But it’s like, calling you handsome,” he looks at Bucky, eyes wide because the fact of him, the vision he is, will never lose its shine. 

“Sure, you’re absolutely that,” and Bucky preens just a bit, eyes glittering; “but what you _really_ are is stunning, goddamn breathtaking, inside and out,” Steve voice ends soft, earnest, but Bucky’s face glows with nothing less.

“Well then, that’s our answer, isn’t it?” Bucky tells him, and reaches up to cup his cheek; Steve isn’t shy in leaning into it, almost greedy. 

“Words and deeds,” Bucky stretches his reach to tease just the edge of Steve’s lips with the pad of his thumb.

“We’ve just been trading in something bigger,” he exhales, the breath gentle against Steve’s skin, but significant enough to slip into the blood in his veins because Bucky’s right, he’s speaking only truth, giving words to the conviction in Steve’s bones.

“And we don’t have to spend time finding words for things we already know.”

Steve’s alight with _those_ words, that truth, _god_, he’s shaking for how full his chest is with feeling and warmth and every sense of rightness he’s ever imagined he could hold: and that is love, undoubtedly. It’s what his Ma used to tell him about, it’s what he used to ache for and lament the impossibility of; and that’s exquisite, but _this_, between _them_, doesn’t stop there. And they’re different, they’re more because they’ve known more, they’ve known life and death, and loss and discovery and undoing and rebuilding and centuries of hurt but also the possibility of joy finally found, _finally_ found. They’re unprecedented, and so this wonder in between them, soft and strong and bright inside their bones: this thing between them is unprecedented, too. 

So Steve can’t stop himself, really, when he leans in to taste that wonder on Bucky’s lips, devouring him, desperate and all-consuming, his tongue seeking to savor the core of him at the back of Bucky’s throat and Bucky gives, simply gives and Steve is grateful beyond all words or sense to just feel, just taste as Bucky’s hands run over his skin, grasp with certainty and knowing, and Steve’s climbing into Bucky’s lap and framing Bucky’s face to draw him closer, and Bucky’s hands hold to Steve’s hips, slip across the curve of Steve’s ass and Steve gasps when he starts to harden against Bucky’s groin, and Bucky swallows the sound as a matter of course. And Steve moans, and Bucky grins against it when Bucky’s touch slides up, as his thumbs tease the crease. And Steve presses, loses all restraint as he rolls his hips into Bucky, who arcs against Steve and Steve follows, his lips sucking under Bucky’s chin, down Bucky’s neck as Bucky’s kneads the globes of muscle in his palms, and Steve pants against Bucky’s body, and they rock back and forth, both leisurely and frantic somehow all at once, and they come within a breath of each other, air scarce but they’re bracing one another through their shaky gasps, thunderous pulses pressed tight together, chest to chest, and yes. Yes.

_Unprecedented_.

They’re curled on their sides, breathing ever slower, foreheads pressed together, when Bucky takes a deep breath and runs his left hand up Steve’s side.

“Sometimes,” he says softly; “it’s nice though.”

Steve blinks his eyes open, not sure what he means, but Bucky’s are still closed, a small smile lilting across his lips as he drags fingers up and down, drawing delicious shudders from base to tip of Steve’s spine.

“To point out the givens,” Bucky eyes remain lidded, but he knows that Steve needs an extra push, and he gets there just so: obvious. 

Of course.

“Essential facts,” Steve nods, still close enough to Bucky’s face that he has to feel it. “Truths that never change.”

“Right.” Bucky’s lips lift in a full smile, now, and that single expression holds Steve’s whole heart inside. “Right.”

Bucky breathes in, breathes out, gentle and completely at ease as he opens his eyes and meets Steve’s own straight on, gaze shining as he beams:

“I love you.”

And oh. _Oh_, but it is _beautiful_ to point out the givens, like a sweetness blooming behind, between Steve’s ribs. It’s stoking the most perfect flames of ecstasy and sending them shimmering through his blood.

“I love you more,” Steve leans, grin impossible to tame, and catches Bucky’s bottom lip between his teeth, drawing a moan and a laugh melded together, exquisite.

“I love you most,” Bucky nips Steve’s lip back, pressing into Steve.

“I love you,” Steve murmurs against Bucky’s mouth, rolling each syllable against his tongue like it’s precious, every one: “James Buchanan Barnes.” He dips his head, settling under Bucky’s chin and Bucky moves innately, to hold him there and let him speak into the hollow of his throat. 

“Heart and soul, I’m yours.”

And Bucky’s own heart jumps under Steve’s lips, an existential agreement, a mirror of those very words and Steve tongues that pulse wantonly, worshipfully, and Bucky’s arms snake around him like he is the end and the beginning of all Bucky knows, and they are unprecedented. This is more than words.

But the words, still, can be so goddamn _sweet_.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in following progress and seeing snippets before they're posted here, [follow me on Twitter](https://twitter.com/hitlikehammers).


End file.
